


Adventures in Solitude

by unimole



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Slow Burn, date coaching, oblivious idiots, schemes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:42:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25993096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unimole/pseuds/unimole
Summary: Hilda is so tired of watching Lorenz strike out with every woman in the general vicinity of Garreg Mach: he needs help, and quick, before the Golden Deer house gets a bad reputation. What if all the female members defect to one of the other houses? Who will help Hilda with all her tedious chores and battle arrangements if, say, Leonie or Marianne aren't around?Claude can only agree that Lorenz needs all the help he can get, but does Hilda really need to try to set him up withTeachof all people? Teach and Lorenz? That seems like an injustice beyond words and he's not so sure he's the type of man who can just stand idly by and watch that kind of thing. Perhaps a scheme or two will set things right...?
Relationships: Lorenz Hellman Gloucester/Hilda Valentine Goneril, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 15
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

“Stop.”

The single word, steely and firmly intoned, rang out across the stretch of grass that ran through the Officers’ Academy. Hilda, leaned against the stone wall that enclosed the Golden Deer classroom next to a similarly leaning Claude, paused in her chatter to glance toward its source. A student whose name Hilda didn’t know and didn’t particularly care to learn was even now crossing her arms, her face settling into something harsh; in front of her, Lorenz was brushing off the thighs of his academy uniform. Hilda squinted: had he been _kneeling_?

When she focused, she found she could just about make out his reply.

“I was only—”

“Well, don’t.”

The student turned and walked away. Partly out of the kindness of her heart and partly out of an instinct to meddle, Hilda made her brief excuses to Claude and set aim on where Lorenz was standing, staring after the angry girl and forlornly stroking that infernal velvet rose he insisted on wearing. It was difficult not to feel a little sorry for him, striking out with such unwavering consistency. Had he ever had a girlfriend? Hilda wondered. Had he ever been kissed? Someone should… honestly, someone should help him. A friend couldn’t just stand by and watch their friend spray their attentions around like a dog with a humping problem. Not only did it hurt her soul to see it (well, most of her soul; admittedly a tiny, more malicious slice of it drank in the drama of men obliviously getting rejected over and over and over again) — sooner or later, he was going to begin to dissuade people from helping out the Golden Deer en-masse. The battalions might be affected! What would Hilda do if she couldn’t call on the Alliance Infantry? She’d have to do _so much work_ all by herself. And with the Battle of the Eagle and Lion coming up!

“That doesn’t look like it’s going very well for you,” she said as she approached. Lorenz almost jumped at the sound of her voice and, startled, wheeled around.

“Hilda!” He cleared his throat. “I… didn’t see you there. My accuracy might not be…”

“Yeah, it’s not,” Hilda said when he trailed off and didn’t continue. “It’s really not. Lorenz, you need help.”

"Help of what sort?"

Hilda's plan only really took shape as she spoke it: "Oh, I don't know. Some sort of coaching."

"Coaching?"

"Well, tutoring, if you like. On how to approach girls," she responded to the question he was clearly about to ask, judging by the way his face was increasingly scrunching up by the second. "How to get a girlfriend! By Hilda Valentine Goneril."

“That is a ridiculous offer.” Lorenz almost visibly inflated with offense taken; it was all Hilda could do not to smile. “Ridiculous. Absurd. Did Sylvain put you up to this?”

“What?” Hilda was genuinely mystified at the accusation: she hardly spent a lot of time socializing with the Blue Lions in general, let alone with one of its most tedious members. “Why would _Sylvain_ have put me up to it?”

“He would want to make a fool of me for succeeding where he doesn’t.”

“Well, you don’t succeed, do you?”

“That seems a little harsh, Hilda.”

“Yeah, but you don’t. And, anyway, Sylvain wouldn’t want you to succeed. You said it yourself. This is a private lesson courtesy of all your good friends in the Golden Deer house.”

She turned toward Claude and winked at him, over the top enough to be visible even at a distance. He raised his eyebrows in very ostentatious confusion but gave her a thumbs up.

“ _Claude_ put you up to this?” Lorenz sounded sour. Sourer, even, than when he thought Sylvain had been involved.

“No, no,” Hilda hastened to reassure him. “Not at all. Just… all the other Golden Deer. We want you to do well! We want you to find a girlfriend.”

_So you stop alienating all the female population of Garreg Mach _,__ she did not say, but thought. ___We’re not gonna have any Pegasus Knights in our house at all at this rate. Marianne is going to defect out of pure embarrassment. Leonie’s going to take her bow and leave.___

“Fine.” Lorenz made it sound like he was doing Hilda a great favor, but she knew he’d be thanking her before long.

“We’ll meet after class,” she said, since Byleth was striding toward them. She shepherded Lorenz into their classroom and sat him down next to a very erect-spined and attentive Lysithea. This was going to be fun, she decided. Or, if not fun, at least interesting. _ _  
__

* * *

Though Lorenz still remained somewhat suspicious that Hilda was trying to prank him, perhaps at the behest of their eminent house leader, he spent the better part of his lecture hour thoroughly enmeshed in batting the pros and cons of meeting with her back and forth until he finally settled on it being a good idea. As an, Lorenz thought it fair to say, objectively pretty noblewoman, Hilda was no stranger to the advances of men; she’d surely endured enough courting both good and bad to be able to advise him on its vagaries. In general, he thought, she wasn’t an underhanded or ill-intentioned sort, perhaps in part because putting in the effort to act with underhanded or ill intention sounded like a lot of work.

And he had to be honest with himself: so far, Hilda was right that he hadn’t had much luck with his attempts despite the fact that he (he also thought it fair to say!) was an objectively handsome nobleman. Perhaps there was something to be said for asking an actual girl her opinions on his methods.

“Come on, Lorenz, eyes on the board,” Professor Byleth called in that simultaneously quite cheerful and quite threatening voice that made her by turns so beguiling and so aggravating. Lorenz looked at her guiltily, stirred from his thoughts. “You’re not going to learn anything about white magic by staring into the fire.”

He made up his mind to spend the rest of the hour applying himself to his studies, as was the duty of the noble. Once the clock struck three, he let himself be scooped up by Hilda more or less willingly.

* * *

“So, one thing you should make sure to do is give the girl compliments,” Hilda said once they were seated at a table in the courtyard and she’d poured herself some tea.

“Compliments.” Lorenz actually jotted that down in a small notebook — the very sight of it made Hilda want to tell him he was far beyond help, but she persevered, good friend that she was.

“Yes, compliments. Like, her hair looks cute. Or that outfit looks great on her. Don’t write that down.”

“Any other wisdom you’d like to impart?” Was he being sarcastic? Hilda squinted at him.

“Don’t come on too strong at first,” she said, sipping daintily from her cup. “Girls don’t like that. Actually… I guess it depends on the girl. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“She would have to be a noble, of course.”

“Of course.” Hilda ran down the list of Golden Deer nobles in her mind. Lysithea? No, too young; besides, she’d never put up with Lorenz’s nonsense. She’d hex him into oblivion the very moment he called her adorable or tried to interrupt her studies. Marianne? More of a possibility, perhaps, but the way she talked about her crest — or, perhaps more to the point, _didn’t_ talk about her crest — left Hilda doubtful that she’d want to join in on Lorenz’s noble love fests. Leonie wasn’t a noble and frankly, even if she had been, Hilda didn’t think she’d put up with Lorenz any more than Lysithea would. It’d have to be someone from a different house. Petra? Annette?

“The talented sort, not too demure yet not unbecomingly feisty.” Not Ingrid, then. “And, though looks aren’t everything…”

“You’d want her to be pretty,” Hilda concluded for him when he seemed reluctant to do so. So that ruled out Bernadetta, she thought to herself with uncharacteristic cattiness, and tried to tamper down a smirk.

“You’re smiling?” Lorenz looked somewhat aggrieved. “I’ll have you know that this is not a joke to me.”

“No, no, of course not.” Hilda forced her facial muscles back into their normal configuration. She hadn’t been smiling at his words, anyway. “But, wow, Lorenz. Those are quite some conditions.”

“It is imperative,” he said, voice swelling with self-importance, “for a noble to marry well. You know this as well as I do, Hilda. It is not simply a union of love, it is—”

“Lorenz, I know, but we’re not trying to find you someone to _marry_. We’re trying to find you a girlfriend. Maybe ease up on the marriage talk? This is what I mean when I say you come on too strong.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He looked somewhat deflated. Hilda just nodded.

“I _am_ right,” she said.

Technically, she supposed whoever Lorenz ended up seeing didn’t necessarily need to be a student. There were plenty of pretty girls and women down in the town proper; surely at least one of them would meet Lorenz’s tedious requirements if Hilda failed to talk him out of them.

Or maybe it could be a non-student of a different sort: Hilda, letting her eyes drift along the paths that cradled the courtyard, watched as their professor walked briskly along them. When she noticed Hilda, or maybe more like noticed Hilda looking at her, she came over, smiling.

“Hilda! And Lorenz!”

“Professor!”

“This looks lovely.” Byleth raised her eyebrows at the three-tiered platter of cakes and scones and the sweet little tea set that Hilda had managed to procure. She was right: it _was_ nice. There was something to be said for talking your admirers into doing favors for you.

“Would you like to join us?” she felt duty-bound to ask. She liked their professor, of course. Who didn’t? But she didn’t particularly want to get sidetracked. It didn’t turn out to be an issue, however; Byleth just flapped her hands at them.

“No, no. Actually, I _would_ like to, I’d love to, but Seteth is on the warpath and I need to either hide or keep moving. He’d definitely come looking for me at a spread as nice as this. I’ll see you two later.”

She strode off again, just as purposefully. Hilda couldn’t help but notice that Lorenz had kept awfully quiet during the course of the conversation — and he wasn’t usually very good at keeping quiet. She also couldn’t help but notice his eyes settling on Byleth’s retreating back in a way that she would categorize as mildly smitten.

_Mildly smitten. Hm!_

She could work with mildly smitten. She could definitely work with mildly smitten. In short order, Seteth did indeed come looking for Byleth. Lorenz's lie that they hadn't seen her since class was so faltering and inadequate it was nearly a feat in itself, but Hilda barely noticed, caught up in her thoughts as she was. Had she just found a possible target for Lorenz’s affection?

* * *

“Our teacher? Hilda, that’s preposterous.” Lorenz tried his best to laugh. It came out like a cross between a cough and a hiccup. It wasn’t like he’d never let his gaze linger on her a fraction of a second too long, but what a thing to propose!

“Not at all.” Hilda began counting on her fingers. “She’s cute. She’s smart. She’s funny.”

“She’s not a noble,” Lorenz felt the need to add. Hilda rolled her eyes in an unnecessarily ostentatious way.

“She might as well be. She’s got the Crest of Flames, that should count for something.”

He supposed it did. He thought it over: their professor was quite comely, it was true. She’d had some words with him about girls seeing her to talk about his advances, which to a layman might not seem encouraging, but of course that just meant he was already established as a viable romantic entity in her mind. In fact, she was no nicer to, say, Ignatz than she was to him. Perhaps she liked him. Or could grow to like him. He nodded with some finality.

“Maybe not entirely preposterous,” he forced himself to admit.

* * *

One day just after noon, Byleth was in the classroom, tidying up after her lecture. Normally, her lectures and classes did not necessitate such an amount of post-lecture tidying, but this time the simulated battles had gone beyond the little figurines on their boards into the realm of people standing on desks (Claude) and throwing chalk (Hilda, with gay abandon and surprising precision) and very loudly telling people off in a way that also apparently required chalk-throwing (Lysithea) and cowering in corners and beneath tables (Ignatz, who claimed that his being pressed up against the far wall simulated the normal position of a battling archer on the edges of the fray; Marianne, who claimed no such nonsense to justify hiding from the projectiles that flew through the room).

Her students were animals, she decided, taking a wash rag to a smear of bright pink pigment on the floor where an errant piece of chalk seemed to have been caught under a trampling foot and crushed into dust. Admittedly, animals she was fond of. She could only imagine how much duller life must be in the Blue Lion and Black Eagle classrooms.

A shadow crossed the open doorway and fell onto her where she was kneeling on the ground and she, generally too alert to let shadows go unnoticed, leaped back up to her feet. It belonged, she registered, to a tall, lanky man. The man drew one hand through his hair, the other seemingly glued to his chest, and inclined his head.

“Lorenz.” Byleth’s tense shoulders relaxed and she lifted her now mostly pink wash rag in greeting as he stepped inside the room. “What can I do for you? Did you come here to help me clean?”

“No. Naturally I did not.” He looked surprised that she would even ask, not that she’d done so very sincerely.

“Right,” she said and prepared herself to cut a treatise on the differences between the duties and expectations of nobles and commoners short. “Well, before you begin—”

“I was simply wondering if you would do me the honor of accompanying me to the dining hall for some repast.”

“Oh.” Byleth had not seen that coming. Though she tended to dine in the company of her students a few times a week, it never took such a formal shape: she generally just sat down with a couple of them and began eating. Theoretically she was headed to the dining hall anyway, though, so she just shrugged. “Sure, that’d be nice. After we’re done cleaning.”

She pointedly handed Lorenz the wash rag. He looked at it like she was handing him a dead rat, but did take it, though he didn’t do much cleaning with it that she could see. While she grabbed a broom and began to sweep the floor, he just stood there holding it; when she gestured at him with an impatient tilt of her head, he sort of began to flick it about the place, which mostly had the effect of displacing chalk dust off the cloth onto nearby surfaces.

“Done?” he said when Byleth leaned the broom back into a corner. She rolled her eyes, but decided she’d come back to finish up after lunch — though she was of half a mind to make him do the job over and do it right, her stomach was growling at her too insistently to be ignored.

“For now,” she said and, still a little taken aback by the formality of it all, let herself be escorted down to the dining hall.

* * *

“Hilda, it seems to me to be pretty rude to your charming lunch companions to keep trailing off while you’re staring at…” Claude let his gaze follow hers. “Lorenz. While you’re staring at Lorenz.”

“I am not!” Hilda turned her attention back to her cheesy Verona stew and began eating with great verve. Claude was still looking over the way of Lorenz and Byleth and she tried furiously to think of a way to make him stop before Byleth noticed. Or Lorenz, for that matter.

“Teach, then,” he amended. “Why are you staring daggers at our dear professor? Did she give you a bad grade on a composition?”

“Yes.” Sometimes it was easier to just agree.

“Well, you can take it up with her after we eat. Marianne thinks you’re rude, too.”

“I don’t…” said Marianne in a very small voice before bending her head so low that she was practically touching the stew with the tip of her nose.

“See? Drowning her sorrows in soup!”

“Claude, stop being an idiot. Marianne,” she felt compelled to add, just in case Marianne was actually upset, “I’m sorry for not paying attention. I’m listening now.”

She let the a long and complicated story about a wyvern going undercover as a horse — courtesy of Claude, of course — wash over her. Marianne seemed intent on every one of its twists and turns, but Hilda was only listening with half an ear. With the other half, she tried to listen in on Lorenz and the professor.

* * *

“How is your fruit and herring tart? A personal favorite of mine.”

Byleth looked absolutely taken with it.

“It’s, ah, very fruity,” she said. “And also very fishy.”

“Yes, indeed.” Lorenz smiled at her. “What a discerning palate you have, Professor. The lean fat from the herring suffuses the plump raisins and imbues them with a kind of ocean sweetness. You might well call it fishy.”

Byleth put her hand to her mouth with what Lorenz surmised must be a gasp of pleasure. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I think I’ll…”

She took to her feet, pointing behind her to the cafeteria line. Lorenz understood, of course.

“Too rich for your stomach?” he said sympathetically. It would take some adjustment, he was sure, to make the switch from commoner food to more noble fare.

“Something like... I’ll be right back, Lorenz.”

* * *

Hilda dared to sneak a peek as she in her peripheral vision caught sight of Byleth standing up abruptly, her hand clutched across her mouth. Surely — even at this early point in her tutelage — Lorenz wasn’t such a hopeless case that he’d put their poor teacher straight off her food? But she didn’t leave the premises, she just went back to the line, heaving a couple of breaths so heavy that Hilda could see her chest moving all the way from where she was sitting. Maybe she was just grabbing a glass of water. Maybe she was dry-mouthed with desire.

_Probably not._

“And then the man said, that’s not a wyvern! That’s my horse!” Claude laughed heartily at the punchline of his own protracted story. Marianne smiled, briefly letting her eyes flick up from her bowl. Hilda, feeling the pressure, forced a chuckle.

* * *

“What are you having instead of the tart, Professor?” Lorenz asked perfunctorily, but he’d already noticed the scent of cheese wafting from the bowl she was carrying. Verona stew. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Shouldn’t her tastes be just a little bit more refined than that? Then again, if, as the saying went, the crest didn’t make the noble — though Lorenz wasn’t entirely sure he agreed with the saying; he suspected it had been popularized by commoners — then perhaps the commoner tastes didn’t ruin the noble, either.

“Just the stew,” she said. “I think I’m more of a stew person than a tart person, generally.”

A ludicrous statement, but Lorenz decided not to comment on it, out of kindness. Who’d willingly declare themselves a stew person?

“It is a pleasure to be allowed your company this lunch hour,” he said instead, internally praising himself for his tact in avoiding the topic of food choice entirely. “I have been wanting to dine with you for some time now.”

“The pleasure is mutual,” she said with a sweet little smile. Oh, that smile! He smiled back, just basking in its light. Hilda had been right to suggest the professor as an option.

“And might I just say that you’re looking particularly fetching today,” he dared to venture. She paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth, something like confusion playing out on her face. Lorenz supposed she did not often receive compliments and so wasn’t used to them. Not because she wasn’t pretty enough to warrant them, of course — but he imagined that only the rare person treading the hallowed halls of Garreg Mach monastery would be bold enough to extend them.

Lorenz considered himself very bold.

“Downright beautiful. Stunning. A rare rose amidst weeds.”

* * *

“All right, what do you want?”

Hilda, still eavesdropping, could easily make out the professor’s words: she’d raised her voice. That wasn’t a good sign. Claude, despite still being taken with mirth over his own jokes, glanced over, and even Marianne shot them a quick look.

“Poor Teach,” Claude said with a laugh. “Maybe someone should go rescue her.” But he did not move out of his seat.

“Lorenz can be…” Marianne began, then looked at Hilda like she was begging her to fill in. Claude got there first:

“Difficult? Overbearing? Absolutely insane?”

Marianne shrugged like she didn’t entirely agree or disagree but would not commit to either option. Hilda had had enough; she pushed away her bowl and stood up.

“I guess you’re right,” she said when Claude and Marianne looked at her. “Someone needs to go and rescue our professor.”

_Or maybe more like, go and rescue Lorenz. From himself._

* * *

“Lorenz, I need to talk to you.”

Lorenz turned to track the source of the voice: Hilda, nearly shouting, as she stalked over.

“Can’t it wait, Hilda?”

“I’m afraid not. Sorry, Professor!”

Hilda grabbed him by the arm and practically began to drag him out of the room, quite uncouthly. Their teacher had an inscrutable look on her face, he noticed, glancing back. She stood up, taking her bowl in one hand and her glass in the other. Was she sad that he was leaving? Or, he forced himself to wonder, glad to see him go? It pained him to admit it, but it could just as easily be the latter. Despite all his considerable effort, he didn’t think he’d made such a good impression.

The last thing he saw, before Hilda successfully managed to pull him into the corridor where she proceeded to tell him off for several minutes straight, was the professor walking over to Claude and Marianne and taking Hilda’s vacated seat. He could only hope that Claude wouldn’t try to pour poison in her ear.

* * *

“What in the world was that?”

Claude tried not to laugh at Byleth’s expression as she slid into the bench next to Marianne and broke off a piece of the bread loaf in the center of the table. She dipped it in her stew.

“Your guess is as good as mine. I think maybe he was trying to get out of being dispatched in our next mission.”

“That seems like more of a Hilda thing. Or a Marianne thing. No offense, Marianne.”

“I just get in the way,” Marianne said in a whisper as mournful as it was quiet.

“You don’t.” Byleth sent Claude a baleful look and he folded his hands behind his head with an apologetic smile.

“You definitely don’t,” he agreed. “You’re our best healer. We’d all be piles of broken bones and scattered lumps of flesh if not for you stitching us up every day.”

“Claude would be, anyway. Some of us are better at dodging than that.”

“Said the axe-wielder to the archer!” Claude grinned and shook his head. “You’re not making Marianne feel very wanted, Teach.”

“Marianne,” Byleth said, turning in her seat. “Without your Nosferatu skills, our kill count would be laughably diminished. And without your healing prowess, Claude would be a pile of broken bones and scattered lumps of flesh.”

Marianne’s face was a picture, torn as it was between relative placation, its normal morose repose, and what looked like slight nausea at the continued choice of figurative language. She put her spoon down. Though Claude was sorry to have potentially ruined her appetite, he couldn’t help but be more interested still in what Lorenz might be up to.

“Are you giving him bad marks? Is that it, Teach?”

“I don’t discuss my grading with other students.”

“So that’s a yes.”

“It’s a ‘no worse than usual.’” She laughed. “You’re such a jerk, Claude.”

“You won’t discuss grading with your students, but you’re happy to call them names?” The words were delivered with a wink and met with an eye roll. “But really, I—”

“He said she’s beautiful,” Marianne said in her usual barely audible whisper. Claude paused, undeniably surprised. Had he heard her wrong? Had _Marianne_ heard Lorenz wrong? Had Lorenz had a fit?

“That’s enough of that,” Byleth said. “Claude, I want to hear the story about the wyvern and the horse that you’ve been teasing all week.”

Well, Claude didn’t need to be asked twice, although as he once again recounted the story he’d told not ten minutes ago — Marianne, the captive audience of an amateur storyteller’s dreams, still gasped in all the right places — he felt his attention drift. Every now and again, he glanced toward the corridor outside the dining hall, but Hilda and Lorenz had both long since disappeared. What was Lorenz up to?

* * *

When the time of the evening meal rolled around, Hilda grimly marched Lorenz into the cafeteria again and sat him down.

“We’re clearly going to have to do things right,” she grumbled as he queried why. Luckily, though the dining hall was full of students and knights, voices and laughter that bounced between the walls and rose toward the rafters, Claude was nowhere in sight and neither was the professor. “Sit down. No, get us some food.”

She was ready to yell at him if he came back with some weird pie — oh yes, she’d finangled the story of the herring and raisin monstrosity out of him — but instead he carefully put two plates of two-fish sauté on the table.

“Good choice.” She eyed her plate up. The flaky fillets were glazed with butter and sprinkled with spices and on the side was a pile of delicate potatoes sliced up and fried — it was all she could do not to bury her face in it, but, for the sake of Lorenz’s edification, she’d probably have to say a few words first.

“I happened to know you like this dish.” Lorenz sounded both proud and a little shy. “We’ve talked about it before.”

Hilda had no recollection of such a conversation, but she nodded, taking her fork and knife in hand.

“Well, this is a good time to discuss food. This goes for gifts, as well. You can’t just give a girl something _you_ would like. You have to pick something you think she would like.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, if you look at me, you might think all girls want to get a nice necklace as a present. But Professor wouldn’t want a nice necklace.”

“No? But it would look stunning around her slender neck.”

Did he have to act so _attentive_? Something about the expression on his face and his eager posture — she didn’t know exactly what — annoyed Hilda. At least he didn’t pull out his little notepad this time.

“Maybe, but she wouldn’t want one. She’d want, I don’t know, something to polish her axe with, maybe. Or a book.” As she spoke, Hilda realized that she herself didn’t know the professor very well. Perhaps some reconnaissance of her own was in order. “Not a necklace.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow. Perhaps I simply need to look harder for the _right_ necklace. The perfect piece of jewelry to adorn a blue-haired beauty.”

“No!” Was he deliberately acting obtuse? “You just think that because you’re talking to me and I like necklaces and because you want to be the kind of guy who gives girls necklaces. But imagine you’re Raphael.”

Lorenz made a face that suggested he wanted to imagine no such thing; Hilda plowed on, undeterred.

“Raphael loves meat. But say he wanted to woo someone like Marianne. He wouldn’t just give her a pack of jerky and think that that cut it.”

“He might.”

It was true, he might, but Hilda didn’t cede the point: “He would not, because Marianne doesn’t want beef jerky and he’d try to pick out something _she_ would like, not something that he would like. Or something that Leonie would like. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so. You wouldn’t serve Claude a cup of sweet-apple blend. Similarly, you wouldn’t serve Lysithea a cup of Almyran pine needles.”

“Yes.” Hilda didn’t know much about tea, but it sounded like he’d roughly gotten the idea. “And just because you like… what do you like?”

“Oh, a nice rose petal blend. You can never go wrong with a cup of bergamot, either. Seiros tea, of course.”

“Right, well, just because you like Seiros tea doesn’t mean you’d serve it to Claude. Or to Lysithea,” she added to head him off at the pass — he’d opened his mouth in a way that she took to mean that he was about to start in on how Claude didn’t deserve the good stuff. “Or to anyone who doesn’t like Seiros tea.”

“I do believe you are correct, Hilda.” He gave her a wide smile, quite a nice one, not the slightly supercilious one he often wore. A genuine and ready smile, one that made the corners of his eyes crinkle pleasantly. “How incisive you are.”

“Thanks!” Hilda wasn’t used to compliments of that variety, but she found she kind of liked hearing it. “So next time you eat with the professor,” she said to really hammer the point home, “don’t—”

“Don’t get her the fruit and herring tart,” Lorenz said, stealing the words out of her mouth. “Get her something I think she might enjoy instead of something I personally enjoy. And if I don’t know what that might be, I should ask her. Is that correct?”

“You’re a quick learner, Lorenz!” Hilda said with a smile and a nod. “Now, why don’t we dig into this delicious-looking meal?”

* * *

Claude prided himself on his ability to find things out. Caspar slept with a teddy bear? Claude knew. Well, probably everyone knew. Every thought and feeling that ever struck Caspar were without delay printed right across his face. Dorothea had a soft spot for Professor Manuela, where “soft spot” equaled “mad crush”? Claude knew that, too. All Sylvain’s nonsense, his bluster and his many, varied, and storied flings, was a means for him to cover up how he really felt about Ingrid? Yeah, Claude was on top of that, although, again, it probably wasn’t _too_ much of a shocker to anyone but Sylvain and Ingrid themselves.

Still. For sure Claude wasn’t going to let whatever was going on between Lorenz and Hilda pass him by unnoticed. He could, of course, just ask Hilda about it (not Lorenz; Lorenz would not give Claude that sort of pleasure if it were the last thing standing between him and a fiery death in a lava pit) but where was the fun in that? He could figure it out himself. He could crack the case, he was sure of it.

So he began to watch them a little closer. Actually, it was kind of weird: all of a sudden — genuinely all of a sudden — you hardly ever saw one without the other. They ate together, almost every meal. They sat together during lectures and in class. They signed up for weekly horse-grooming chores together and wandered the paths winding around the monastery together, heads close, talking intently. Scheming?

What a world if _Lorenz_ started scheming.

"Lunch today, Hilda?" he asked the girl who he thought he was his best friend one Thursday in the morning break between lectures. The alleged best friend just smiled at him kind of smugly and said, "Sorry, Claude, I'm doing something with Lorenz. Saturday?"

"Fine." Claude had lunch with Ferdinand and the Empress instead, which was pretty funny because Ferdinand kept trying to challenge Edelgard to things like who could drink their milk the fastest or who could eat the most mashed potatoes and she just wasn't having it. Still, every so often he afforded himself a curious glance Lorenz’s and Hilda's way. They looked to be enjoying themselves more than he could ever have imagined possible, both of them occasionally bursting into laughter — not even, seemingly, at each other but at some shared joke. Hilda took a piece of something off Lorenz's plate and, after a moment of contemplation, nodded her approval. Every now and again they surreptitiously looked over at Teach, who was doing little that particularly warranted looking at apart from just generally being Teach, which, sure, wasn't _nothing_ , but c'mon.

Claude couldn't quite figure it out, so when Hilda did not show on Saturday (which he'd honestly not even expected her to, because she was flaky at the best of times) he decided to try to track her down and see what exactly she was up to. Not as an exercise in stalking, although slightly, he supposed, akin to an exercise in stalking. Okay, so he would just take a walk around Garreg Mach and see if he happened to see them. That didn't seem so bad. Maybe he didn't walk to the places he thought they might not be — he could not, for instance, see either Hilda or Lorenz taking part in an impromptu weekend sparring session — but so what?

After a while, he almost forgot about them. It was a nice day and he ran into Ignatz and Teach on his little jaunt. Ignatz only intermittently managed to tear his gaze away to look at Claude when he spoke, but that was Ignatz for you. On reflection, a _lot_ of the Golden Deer men seemed very thirsty. Not Raphael, he supposed. They'd all have to put their hopes in Raphael.

And he himself wasn't too bad either, he didn't think.

"This is beautiful," Byleth said in an almost breathless voice as their walk took them onto a narrow forest path. Squirrels scattered as they heard their steps and leapt up trunks, settling on branches. The air was so green and lush and warm beneath the crowns of leaves swaying softly above their heads that the day began to feel heavy and somnolent, though not in an unpleasant way. It was all Claude could do not to suggest they do a Linhardt and find a spot to take a nap. He looked at Teach’s face, radiant with the rare pleasure of being outside after so many long lecturing days in the gray stone halls of Garreg Mach and radiant with the sun filtering onto her through the leafage, and smiled.

“Yeah, it is beautiful,” he agreed. Ignatz added his voice to the chorus of approval.

“You could paint it, Ignatz,” she said. Ignatz looked a little surprised.

“You remember I paint, Professor Byleth?”

“Of course I remember you paint. You’re good. If you do a picture of this, I’ll buy it from you.”

“I’d give it to you freely,” Ignatz protested. “No payment required.”

“Well, that sounds even better. It’s a deal.” Teach grinned at Ignatz and Ignatz grinned back. Claude opened his mouth to say something teasing, like maybe Ignatz should add his beloved goddess to the image or, failing that, his beloved professor, but his train of thought was interrupted by voices. One male and one female, coming from the right, where a picnic blanket was laid out and spread with sandwiches.

“Hi, Professor! And Ignatz. And Claude.”

Hilda stood up from where she’d been sitting next to Lorenz. Incongruously and perplexingly, there were tiny twigs in her hair and her normally impeccable stockings looked scuffed at the knees. Claude stared at her in abject and total shock. She couldn’t have… She _wouldn’t_. Not here. Not with _Lorenz_.

But Lorenz didn’t look at all ruffled nor embarrassed at their intrusion, so probably not, right? He just said, “Hello, all,” in his superior voice. Hilda followed Claude’s gaze to her knees and then to her hair. Apparently unconcerned, she picked one of the twigs out and tossed it to the ground, where it bounced off the leafy ground and back onto the picnic blanket.

“I accidentally tripped,” she said, though she made it sound like it couldn’t be that accidental, “and I was tea— I mean, Lorenz demonstrated his knowledge of what to do in a situation where a damsel is in distress.”

“That’s a curious way of putting it, Hilda,” said Ignatz, which was true. Claude squinted at her.

“Yes, well. And now we’re having this beautiful picnic that Lorenz packed. All by himself!” She pointed at the sandwiches and at some bottles of lemonade, even a small cluster of forget-me-nots in a little vase, and beamed proudly, like she, despite her words to the contrary, had somehow been instrumental in the picnic’s packing. She probably had; did Lorenz even know how to make sandwiches? Then again, did Hilda?

“That’s great,” Teach said. She turned to Claude and Ignatz and said, “Maybe next time we could bring a picnic, too.”

Claude found he liked how Teach was taking it as a given that there would be a next time for this sort of walk, and he also kind of particularly enjoyed the idea of staying for a meal with her. Oh, and with Ignatz, he supposed, even though they were not very close friends.

“And you could bring your paints,” she said to Ignatz, who nodded eagerly.

There was a quiet moment and then Hilda said, “Well, anyway, you must be busy.” Something about her hurried tone made Claude look between her and Lorenz again. She sounded like she couldn’t wait to get back to whatever it was they’d been doing, and the sooner Claude and Ignatz and Teach leave, the better.

What _could_ they have been doing? He accepted Hilda’s explanation that she’d fallen down to account for her scuffed stockings, and not only because imagining any other explanation was a horrifying prospect, but she’d still been spending an awful lot of private time with Lorenz lately and she seemed desperate to keep that private time going, even now.

It was totally inexplicable, but he supposed they must be in love.

* * *

Lorenz was learning, Hilda thought privately, slowly but surely, though actually _telling_ him that might be counter-productive. Hilda had a hunch that even a small amount of praise could send somebody already prone to overestimating his own impact into the stratosphere, and, learning or not, he just wasn't yet at a point where that would do. In more hopeless moments, like when Lorenz tried out florid, confused metaphors on her or when he stubbornly refused to acknowledge that his dumb velvet rose was a bad look, Hilda wished she'd picked a less exacting target than Professor Byleth, who, she had reason to suspect, was picky about her romantic prospects. Well, at least Hilda had never once heard talk of any romantic entanglements on the professor's part, and (both as a method of research and — yes, she'd confess it — due to an ever-so-slight interest in gossip) Hilda tended to keep her ear to the ground. Garreg Mach and its monastery didn't really lack for viable prospects, either, in Hilda's opinion; most likely, Byleth just had high standards.

Which occasionally would seem to augur bad tidings for Lorenz — yet every now and again there was a flash of hope, when Hilda felt like she was stepping out of her body and looking at Lorenz with an objective eye. Not just the fool who happily let himself be tricked into covering for Hilda in battle, not just her fellow Golden Deer who kept striking out like he was paid to do it, not just a guy who nursed a sometimes disturbing obsession with nobility. Rather, it sometimes struck her, Lorenz was a tall, handsome young man with a good heart, if nothing else. Good intentions. A ready mind. A surprisingly fun sense of humor, once you knew to look for it. Really, there was no short supply of qualities to recommend him. Shouldn't Byleth be so lucky?

She told Claude as much one day when they were killing time waiting to be dispatched to a routine bandit-routing mission, but he apparently did not share her view of things, though evident surprise swept across his features. The surprise soon resolved and settled into a more general look of something dawning on him.

"Oh, Hilda. Hilda. I thought you were… Well, never mind.” It took only a second for Claude, having trailed off, to pick back up with: “Lorenz and Teach? You're trying to set up _Lorenz_ with _Teach_.” The look on Claude's face changed from the delight of learning something new to the purposely quizzical. “Nope, didn't make any more sense the second time around."

"What?" Hilda asked a mite defensively; she wasn't sure if it was on Lorenz's behalf or just on behalf of her own taste. "What's wrong with that? Our professor's pretty cute."

"Sure, Teach is great, but Lorenz isn't."

“He’s not too bad.”

“Hilda, he absolutely is.”

“You don’t know him like I know him—”

“I think I know him well enough, Hilda!” Claude shook his head. “How long have I had to put up with him now? Anyway, what do you mean ‘know him like you know him?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hilda found she didn’t know exactly how to respond to that and she saw no reason to try. She ignored the annoying smile spreading across Claude’s face and just reiterated her earlier points in a slightly defiant murmur, more than ready to change the topic.

“How long do you think this will take?” she said, scanning the page that they’d been given with their mission brief. “I hope we’ll be back home soon.”

Unfortunately, Claude didn’t appear to be listening.

“Over my dead body is Lorenz getting together with Teach.” But he didn’t sound angry, not properly, mostly just amused and determined. His eyes narrowed like his mind was beginning to work and whir. Well, if it was going to be like that! Hilda might not as a rule put too much work into any one thing, but this was different. She felt as though her reputation were at stake: she crushed the paper with the brief into her pocket and crossed her arms.

“Well, I hope you rest in peace, Claude.”

Claude just laughed, which was infuriating enough in itself.


	2. Chapter 2

Claude imagined Lorenz stroking an errant lock of hair from Professor Byleth's eyes. He imagined Lorenz meeting her unwavering (sometimes, in class, unsettlingly unwavering) gaze with his own until her eyes softened and her face melted into a somewhat rare smile. The problem was that her smile, when she smiled, was so good, Claude reflected; so good that all her Golden Deer vied to elicit one, well, maybe Leonie excepted. Claude very much not excepted, though — sometimes he felt like it was his life work pursuing those little smiles and smirks and grins, trying to figure out what combination of jokes and schemes and hard work would trigger one. It wasn’t weird or uncharacteristic of him, he didn’t think; he’d always lived to figure out secrets, teasing out meaning where some might think there was no meaning to tease out or just straight out give up at the daunting prospect of teasing it.

And Teach was the biggest secret there was. That’s all there was to it.

His idle train of thought was once more jolted by the specter of Lorenz, intruding on his mind like the starving Raphael bursting into the dining hall each evening. Lorenz making Teach smile. Lorenz cupping her jaw in his hand, gently, gently. Lorenz leaning forward to slowly touch his lips to her parted lips as he…

_No._

Claude couldn’t let that happen. He liked Lorenz (well, he liked Lorenz okay) but Teach was _Teach_. There might well be men and women in Garreg Mach who were good enough for her, it wasn’t like Claude had reason to keep tabs on her love life, but Lorenz was surely at the very bottom of that list. What was Hilda thinking? Yeah, Lorenz needed help, no doubt about it. Didn’t mean Hilda could just pawn him off on Teach. On Teach!

“Bullion for your thoughts.”

Claude started at Byleth’s words. He looked up almost guiltily, trying to hide his discomfort with a smile, and, for lack of anything else to do, took a piece of shortbread from the tray on the table between them and put it on his plate.

“I don’t think they’re worth as much as all that,” he said evasively.

“Yeah, right. You were brooding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you brood.”

He recognized the look on her face, because it reflected back one he knew he himself often wore: she looked curious. Inquisitive. A dog with a bone, more than willing to relentlessly pursue the information she sought until she got it, by any means necessary. An image of himself tied up and helpless with Teach leaned over him, interrogating him, flashed into his mind and he batted it away in a hurry.

“It’s nothing,” he said and took a sip of quite cold tea. Of course he could tell her about Hilda’s plans, and they’d laugh, and she’d probably nicely let Lorenz know that she wasn’t interested. He didn’t really know how to phrase it in a way that didn’t make him sound personally invested, though, more personally invested than he’d care to come across, even though he was obviously not really that personally invested. Or… what if she’d be pleased to hear it? What if she _was_ interested? What if it would tip her over into accepting Lorenz’s overtures?

“Nothing,” she echoed, her voice laced with skepticism.

“Nothing!” Claude said for a third time. He made his eyes narrow with a smile, even though his thoughts were racing more than he felt was warranted. “You know me, Teach, I’m an open book.”

She laughed at that and Claude grinned back, relieved to see the curious look on her face dissolve.

“If you’re an open book,” she said, taking his cooling cup from him and pouring him a new one with steam rising from the surface, “I’m a whole library’s worth.”

“Of open books?” Claude received the tea with a nod of gratitude.

“Yeah. And I think you know that’s saying something.”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, Teach.”

Byleth raised an eyebrow, very nearly smirking. “My open books?” she said.

“Your secrets.” Not that Claude had any intention of giving up his actual thoughts. He could probably lose his grip on a smaller, lesser secret, though, in service of hearing something even slightly personal about his enigma of a professor. “Like, how old are you?”

“I’ve heard that that’s not a question you ask of a lady,” Byleth said. She stretched out a tentative hand and put it on top of Claude’s. The gesture was somehow awkward and clearly unrehearsed yet something about it made Claude more acutely aware of his hand than anything that had ever happened to him, from wyvern bites to the first time he’d gotten to touch a girl’s breast. It seemed to throb where her slender and sword-grip-calloused fingers laid on his skin and his whole chest contracted with something like panic; he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to pull his hand away or whether he wanted to keep it there — feel it more — maybe even touching her back.

But that was an insane thing to think. He almost physically felt his eyes widen in confusion as he looked at Byleth. She gave him a little smile and removed her hand from his.

“I’m here if you want to talk,” she said. “You don’t need to brood alone. Well, you can if you want to. But I’m here for you.”

Here for him? Claude’s mouth opened, full of words he wasn’t sure how to arrange in the right order.

“And so are the rest of the Golden Deer,” she finished.

_Oh. Right._

* * *

"Professor!"

On the path into town, Byleth turned to see a small pink figure barreling toward her. She paused and waited for Hilda to catch up.

"Can I walk with you?" Hilda asked.

"Of course. What's up?"

Byleth liked Hilda. She knew she was supposed to disapprove of her constant attempts to wriggle out of doing the work she was assigned, and she sort of tried to project an aura that she did, but secretly she found the increasingly outlandish excuses pretty funny.

"You're on provisions duty today, right? Well, can I help?"

"Can you _help_?" Byleth wasn't sure if she'd misheard.

"Yes. Well, maybe you could show me how to do it," she said, which was such a Hilda thing to say that Byleth couldn't stop herself from laughing. Hilda just gave her a winning smile in return. "And then I also need some new clothes. And I happened to notice that the hem on those shorts you sometimes wear was fraying a little, so… maybe you want to look at some clothes, too!"

Byleth hadn't noticed any fraying hem, but admittedly she trusted Hilda to make that sort of observation far more than she trusted herself. Anyway, she'd just received her monthly paycheck or grant or whatever Lady Rhea called it and, since everyone's weapons were currently in shipshape, all she really had to spend it on was a hundred different teas for all her surprisingly tea-opinionated students. Not that that couldn't get very pricey very quickly, but still. She could probably spare some money for a new pair of shorts.

"Great," she therefore said, harnessing her laughter into a smile. "You show me how to buy clothes and I'll show you how to buy provisions."

Hilda beamed at her. Once they made it to the market, she actually showed a surprising aptitude for haggling. They picked up a large amount of Lorenz's favorite Seiros tea for a song and two bottles of mead for Raphael for practically nothing. Each stall they went to, Byleth hung back and just watched, impressed despite herself.

"Five gold for _those_ onions?" Hilda hooted, picking up the lone shriveled little thing in a pile of vividly orange globes. She blocked the nice onions from view with her sleeve and thrust the dried husk into the seller's face. "I'll give you two."

They walked away with a bag full of beautiful onions for less than half price.

"Twenty gold? Very well!" Hilda dug in her leather satchel for the money, then paused and let a worried look cross her pretty features. She was good, Byleth had to give her that. "I only have nine… no, wait, ten."

She carefully lined each gold piece up in front of the already-wrapped Duscur bear steak and smiled a little forlornly at the young man behind the counter.

"I must have dropped the rest somewhere," she pouted. "Can I look for it and come back? No, oh, I have so much to do and I need this meat for my ailing little sister back home, she is so anemic. It's urgent. She might die any moment!"

She was _very_ good, Byleth silently amended. And sometimes fascinatingly lacking in morals. The man made some slightly conflicted noises, but Hilda stymied them by leaning forward a little bit toward him. She put her hand on his arm.

"Maybe I could pay you thirty next time I'm here?" she said, letting her hand stroke his bare skin just lightly and somehow summoning a blush to her cheeks. "Because… you know. Well, how could I stay away?"

From that particular stall, they walked off with a twenty gold cut of steak weighing down their bag and their pockets just ten gold lighter.

"That was good," Byleth said to Hilda once they'd made it to the other side of the market, where the garment merchants plied their wares.

"Was it?" Hilda said coyly.

"Well, I guess I should be telling you not to lie, and we should probably take a different route home to your anemic sister so that kid doesn't see you again, but… I mean, don't tell Seteth I said this, but it's pretty impressive how you always manage to get what you want."

"Professor!" Hilda said. "A compliment? That's so nice of you!"

"Don't get used to it," Byleth replied, albeit jokingly.

* * *

Although Hilda had originally decided to accompany Professor Byleth to town so she could, on Lorenz’s behalf, subtly probe her on what she might like to receive in the way of gifts, she swiftly abandoned that plan in service of giving the good professor a makeover. She was already pretty cute, of course; the natural assets were all there.

But there was nothing wrong with highlighting those natural assets. Hilda wasn’t sure whether Byleth would let her actually apply make-up or fix up her hair, but she seemed more or less amenable to receiving a little bit of fashion advice. Therefore, when Hilda saw a swathe of fabric glowing the soft cerulean of the seas outside Derdriu, she immediately snatched the hanger up and held it in front of Byleth. It would be a good color on her, Hilda thought, looking at the dress with a critical eye. It would bring out the deeper blue tones in her hair.

"Isn't this very revealing?" Byleth asked, squinting down at the garment. It was a bit; it was short and cut quite deep, both in the front and in the back, but Hilda still had high hopes for it.

“No, no,” she said, craftily lowering the hanger a little bit so it’d look like it extended further down her thighs, should Byleth look down. “You can pull it off, Professor.”

Byleth still looked a bit dubious, but she looked at the price tag and shrugged.

“If you say so,” she said and took it from Hilda. Hilda chose a similar one in pink, though it was a little more proper in cut. They looked at shorts for a while — Hilda was not herself a big fan of shorts, it seemed more like a Leonie kind of thing, but Professor Byleth insisted — then leafed through the shirts and blouses. Hilda managed to convince her to pick up some slightly slinky and well-tailored ones by telling her honestly that she had a striking figure and she should show it off. Well, it was true. And honestly she mostly seemed pretty happy to show it off, judging by that bustier and those hot pants she sometimes wore — Lorenz had talked about _those_ enough.

"Don't you have a tutoring session with Lorenz tonight?” she said, as they trudged their way back up the hill with all their purchases, still silently preoccupied with the intersection of ‘Lorenz’ and ‘Professor Byleth looks pretty hot in skimpy clothes.’ “You should wear your new dress!"

“Maybe,” Byleth said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit much to wear just like that? A bit too... colorful?”

Hilda’s gale of laughter was slightly diminished by the fact that her breath was stolen away from her by their brisk hill-walking, even though you wouldn’t think that’d be a problem for someone used to carting around a suit of armor. Maybe she should be just a little bit more diligent in her training pursuits. She could ask Lorenz if he wanted to spar with her during the weekend.

“It’s an _every-day_ dress, Professor,” she said. “Totally informal. You should try it out! Oh, come on!”

In fact, she’d brook no disagreement: she muscled her way inside Byleth’s room and pointedly turned away while she changed, then, with great oh-would-you-look-at-the-time verve, deposited her outside the library and left.

* * *

When Byleth strode into the library where Claude, Lysethia and Petra were doing their homework for Professor Hanneman's crest seminar, all three of them looked up and, momentarily stunned, kept looking. She was wearing an outfit that was absolutely, definitely, beyond any shadow of a doubt new: Claude's jaw dropped and so did his eyes, landing on a very deep neckline arranged beautifully around a pair of creamy, swelling tits. He forced himself to look back up.

"Professor!" said Petra, cheerful and blunt as ever. "You look extremely curvature!"

Lysethia, clearly aiming to kick Petra beneath the table, slammed her foot into Claude's shin instead. He didn't even flinch. A blush was spreading across Byleth's face, slowly painting her cheeks pink like a drop of watercolor blooming in a water glass. He'd never seen Teach blush.

"I know. It's a bit…" She trailed off. "Hilda picked it. I'll go get changed after meeting Lorenz, but I don't have time right now. Does it look really dumb?"

"Well—" Lysethia began and Claude knew he had to interrupt her because, even if she wasn't about to start in on how curvy Teach looked (and she really did look very curvy), she had little patience with what she regarded as frippery and would likely tell Teach as much. Claude didn't want her to have to feel self-conscious.

"You look great," he said and tried to make himself sound casual, not like someone who'd be quite happy to let his gaze rest in her cleavage for a while — well, he was only human.

"Are you sure?" she said. Lysethia sent him a blatantly unimpressed look, like she suspected him of having ulterior motives in saying so. But he actually didn't, for once, at least except for saving Teach the potential awkwardness of Lysethia being straight with her.

"Totally," he therefore said and continued, "And, look, here's the man of the hour," when Lorenz walked in. Byleth greeted him and they took a seat at a table quite far away from the one where he and Lysethia and Petra were working. Lysethia picked their prep work back up like she'd barely been interrupted, but something was niggling at Claude.

Teach was meeting Lorenz for a tutoring session. In an outfit picked out by Hilda. A very revealing outfit — not just the depth of her cleavage but, Claude was slightly ashamed to say he'd noticed, the totally minuscule length of her skirt.

_Lorenz plus Teach plus revealing outfit picked by Hilda plus Hilda scheming to set Teach up with Lorenz equals…_

"Claude, do you think there is any truthfulness to the theory that crests may have their origins as curse marks or brands?" Petra asked. "In question four."

Claude reluctantly returned to the world of crests and Hanneman's ramblings, trying to shake the feeling of distraction. Hilda trying to set Lorenz up with Teach was one thing, if an irritating thing. Dressing Teach up in skimpy clothes and practically dangling her in front of Lorenz for him to salivate over was another thing entirely. He could not let Hilda get away with this, he decided.

“Claude,” Lysithea said sternly. “Concentrate.”

He could not let her get away with it.

* * *

"Damn, Lorenz, what's this? Is it your birthday? Many happy returns of the day!"

Lorenz glanced up at the interminably trying Sylvain, who'd just come into the library and, as far as Lorenz could tell, had made a beeline straight for their table, as ever drawn to girls like a fly to honey. He crouched down at the side of the table, leaving him just eye level with Professor Byleth's — Lorenz wouldn't even stoop to thinking the words.

"What do you mean?" he said somewhat stiffly. Professor Byleth, too, put her pen down and looked at Sylvain.

"Well, looks like Professor got all dressed up for ya." He ostentatiously let his eyes drift over Byleth, up and down, pausing only for a fraction of a second on her, oh, all right, her cleavage.

That split second was enough to make Lorenz want to cast a hex on him. Nothing bad, just something mildly vein-constricting and painful. Although the idea of Professor Byleth dressing up especially to meet him was, of course, appealing; he couldn't exactly deny that, and he himself sized her up with an appraising second glance. Could that be what she had done?

If she had, she clearly at the very least did not like being looked at like she was a piece of meat — that much was evident from the way she practically hunched over beneath their gazes, though in practice it only made the neckline scoop deeper to give both Sylvain and Lorenz more of an eyeful — and Lorenz immediately stopped looking, occupying himself with his clutch of papers instead. He did not want to make Professor Byleth feel unhappy, and not only because she could be absolutely terrifying.

Sylvain showed no such compunction. If he wasn't physically licking his lips already, Lorenz was sure it was only a matter of time.

"What do you say you give me some private lessons after you're done with Lorenz, Professor?" he said, his tone husky with innuendo.

But before he could continue, and before Byleth could begin to respond, suddenly, with what Lorenz could only describe as a squawk, Sylvain pitched forward and fell over.

"So sorry," came Claude's voice, though he did not sound sorry at all. "I needed to grab a book and I guess I accidentally kicked you."

He flashed them the book — a novel called _Frederick the Wyvern: Above the Clouds and What Frederick Found There_. Part of a series of Alliance classics for children, it had been a particular favorite of Lorenz's growing up, but he did not see how it could possibly relate to any work Claude was doing.

The thought made him smile behind the hand he’d put up to his mouth when Sylvain went flying. Claude was an annoying person, one of the most annoying people Garreg Mach had to offer, but there was no denying Sylvain had deserved a shove. He laid sprawled there on the dusty rug for a moment before using his elbows to push himself back up.

"Oh, and I think I saw Ingrid rounding the corner," Claude added. "So you might want to stop being a skeeve or I'm sure you'll get more than a single accidental kick."

Sylvain looked at him accusingly as he took to his feet.

"I didn't mean it," he said to Claude rather than to Professor Byleth. "It was just a joke."

But Claude didn't reply. He just said, "Lorenz. Teach," and, with a nod to each of them, went back to his table.

Lorenz decided that he didn't care whether or not their professor had dressed up specifically to meet him; indeed, he decided to ignore the Sylvain incident entirely. Instead, he just took up a piece of paper from his sheath and said, "Professor Byleth, is it true that there are times when it is tactically advisable for even a non-mounted mage to run into the fray?"

* * *

Although Sylvain had come by to her office hours with a quite sincerely delivered apology, Byleth decided to banish the offending dress to the very back of her closet. Actually, maybe she should just give it away. Or incinerate it in one of the classroom's fireplaces.

"Oh, keep it, why don't you?" Sothis said in a teasing voice as Byleth began to ball it up. "I think there were those who… quite liked it."

"Yes," Byleth said, or thought. "I sure got that impression." She squinted at the depths of the closet, which gaped too empty by half. Maybe she really did need some new clothes.

"Don't be ridiculous," Sothis admonished. "That's not what I meant. Are you so easily led that you will let a boy tell you what not to wear? A stupid boy?"

Byleth paused. She thought about the way Lorenz had looked at her briefly, and the way Sylvain had looked at her for as long as he could — like she’d dolled herself up for their viewing pleasure, like she was there not in a professional capacity but to giggle and wink beneath their roving eyes. Of course, Lorenz had stopped almost immediately and Sylvain had at least asked her forgiveness. Maybe, she thought with a wry smile, Ingrid had threatened to beat him up if he didn’t. Or Claude had threatened to beat him up.

The image of Sylvain toppling over with Claude’s well-aimed kick floated into her mind, despite her attempts to try to stop it, because of course she shouldn’t find any joy in one of her students kicking another. Yeah, Claude, too, had checked out her ‘extreme curvature,’ as Petra would have it, but just for a second before he’d stopped himself. Maybe that was why she hadn’t felt quite so bad about his eyes on her — a little embarrassed, kind of, but not _bad_. Claude treated her like a person, and it had taken him practically no time at all to stop looking, and he’d not-so-obliquely told Sylvain off when _he_ wouldn’t stop, and that, silly and contradictory though it was, made her not mind so much that’d he’d checked her out a bit. She probably wouldn’t even have minded too much if he’d checked her out a bit longer.

She allowed herself to imagine it for a second and then she mentally told herself to shut up. She was not there to be ogled, no matter how gallant the man doing the prospective ogling. When she’d gone to the library, it had been to tutor Lorenz, nothing more and nothing less. All that aside, Claude, and Lorenz and Sylvain, of course, were all her _students_ , not—

"Save the dress,” Sothis interrupted her with a voice that rang more cryptic than usual, if such a thing were possible. “You might find use for it in the future."

It was with a slight sense of unwillingness, mostly because she did not like proving Sothis in any way right, that Byleth shook the dress back out and returned it to its hanger.

"There you go," Sothis said. "Maybe you're not as dumb as you look!"

* * *

“Hilda,” Claude said, catching her on the way out of the greenhouse before she could scurry off to no doubt see Lorenz again, “I know all’s fair in love and war, but that dress?”

Hilda made quite a show of looking down at her academy uniform; Claude rolled his eyes.

“Not your dress. Teach’s dress. Don’t play dumb,” he added before she could say anything. “I know you’re anything but dumb.”

“Oh, the _blue_ one,” Hilda said after pretending to rack her brain for a moment. “It was adorable, wasn’t it?”

‘Adorable’ wasn’t exactly the word Claude would have picked, but he refused to think for another second about the incandescent pallor of Teach’s skin, not to mention several other things going on around the neckline and the hem, and so he accepted it.

“Yeah. ‘Adorable.’ Sylvain sure thought it was adorable, too.”

“Sylvain? It wasn’t meant for _Sylvain_ , it was meant for Lor—” Hilda didn’t finish that train of thought, but Claude picked it up immediately.

“Yeah, I know it was for Lorenz, Hilda. Big surprise. But, what, you dress her up like that and think every guy in the room’s not gonna drool his head off?”

“Every guy in the room?” Hilda repeated slyly. “Every guy in the room, Claude?”

He knew she was trying to rile him up to distract him from the issue at hand, but he’d gladly disabuse her of that tragic notion.

“If even I noticed what she looked like,” he said, “what do you think Sylvain thought? I’m surprised he didn’t get his dick out right then and there.”

Hilda actually looked a little disturbed at those words. A couple of passing students turned around without even pretending not to eavesdrop. Claude wouldn’t let himself be daunted.

“I’m sure I’m hearing you wrong,” she said, rallying. “You’re not trying to police what Professor Byleth chooses to wear? Just because she’s hot doesn’t mean she can’t wear a nice dress.”

“I’m not trying to police anything except you trying to dress Teach up for Lorenz’s viewing pleasure. You seriously think she wanted him to stare at her tits instead of getting on with his work?”

“Maybe. You’d be surprised,” Hilda twinkled at first, but then thought about it and said, “Did he really?”

Actually, from what Claude had seen, Lorenz had acted respectfully enough, but Hilda didn’t need to know that. “Yes,” he said. “Did he ever!”

“Fine,” Hilda said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Good,” Claude said, though he wasn’t totally happy. He still thought Teach could do better. And he still didn’t want Hilda to get the last word on this.

* * *

A few days later, Byleth asked Claude to stay behind after class, impulsive in a way she ordinarily was not.

“What’s up?” he asked, taking the seat she indicated. She sat down next to him, but paused.

“Are you busy?”

“Never too busy for you, Teach.” His voice was plain old Claude, humorous and a little glib, but his face shifted with an expression she couldn’t quite place, just for half a second before it changed back into his usual ready smile. Maybe she’d imagined it.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” she said, and though it was probably silly, she went on, "I don't know how old I am. I've asked my— Jeralt, but he just says he never counted and doesn't remember."

"He doesn't remember how old his only daughter is?” Claude said. His demeanor changed again, though in a more easily interpreted way: this time he seemed caught somewhere between exasperation — with her father? On her behalf? Was that something she wanted? _Should_ it be something she wanted? — and contemplation. He looked at her in a way that made her both want to stay beneath his gaze and run somewhere and hide. She couldn’t quite reconcile the two conflicting urges and so she just busied herself with the blotter on her desk as he continued, “I can't lie, Teach, that's kind of weird."

"Yeah, I know,” Byleth said. Picking up a pen and giving it one succinct tap, she let a drop of deep red ink fall onto the blotter, where tendrils feathered out around the center like a growing net of capillaries. She chased them with the pen’s sharp nib. “But it's true. It's true that's what he's told me, anyway."

"Huh. Don't you remember anything from being a kid? Maybe you could figure it out from that."

"Not really. I remember this dream I've always had about… a war. And a young girl." Though Claude would surely be interested to learn about Sothis, she didn't know if she really wanted to go down that road. A slightly sneaky giggle resonated through her mind. "All I can remember is being a mercenary," she said instead. "I didn't have a very normal childhood."

"That makes two of us, I suppose," said Claude and she gave him a measuring look, unsure what he meant.

"Well," she said, just in case she was inadvertently making him feel uncomfortable, "since you asked the other week, I thought I might as well tell you. It's not really a secret. But there you go."

"Thanks, Teach," Claude said in a voice characterized by none of its usual humor. He sounded downright earnest. "I appreciate the confidence."

"No problem." His earnestness — the way he was looking at her, not like he very briefly had that day in the library but almost solemnly — made Byleth feel a little strange somehow. Uncertain of the wisdom of offering up what could be considered personal information to a student, perhaps. Of course it wasn't just some student. This was Claude. They were friends. "Like I said, it's not much of a secret. And you're none the wiser, anyway."

"Wiser about Captain Jeralt's strange child-rearing ways," Claude offered and Byleth smiled reluctantly. He paused for what seemed like a moment of thought and then said, "Hey, Teach. Your turn. Ask me something."

"How old are you?"

She knew his age from the dossier she'd been given on all the Golden Deer students way back when she was strong-armed into the post, and he knew that she knew, she supposed, because he just laughed.

"That's not what you want to know," he said.

"No, you're right. Okay. What were you brooding about over tea the other day?"

Though it remained in evidence, Claude's smile kind of stiffened at her question, and he said, "Sorry, Teach, that's classified information. Not really my secret to tell."

"Right."

"But try again."

"What did you mean about your childhood?” she asked at last, her curiosity getting the best of her. “I'm pretty sure you weren't a mercenary."

"No," he said. "You're right. Wouldn't that have been something? It's, ah, a bit complicated. Suffice it to say that I grew up in kind of two worlds. You feel like an outsider in one and then you think that you're at least gonna be accepted by the other. But then, surprise, you're just as much of an outsider there."

A reel, an imaginary one, began rattling off quietly inside Byleth’s head: a much smaller, younger, more insecure Claude telling himself that he was going to be fine in one world if not the other, not that she had any idea what the two worlds could be referring to. Finding that that was not the case. Learning, she supposed, to cloak his feelings and thoughts with that smile he shot off at the slightest provocation and with a keen and swift sense of humor that must have been quite carefully cultivated. The image of that younger face floated on Byleth’s retina, a transparency on top of Claude’s real face, and a hand seemed to clutch around her heart, pressing and twisting.

“Byleth,” Claude said with a laugh, “why so despondent? You look like you’re going to cry. You don’t cry, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Byleth said, though of course that wasn’t strictly true. She wasn’t going to cry now, though; that was a level of vulnerability that would be inappropriate at best, if not downright insane. Still, the pressure in her chest remained. It was all too much somehow and too overwhelming, down to the fact that he’d called her by her name instead of his habitual ‘Teach’, and yet it was not enough. Even though he was laughing and in no way seemed particularly upset or in need of consolation, she wanted to push her chair closer to his and drag him into her arms. She didn’t know how to do that, though, without putting too much of herself into it in a way she couldn’t countenance. Sometimes the rare student hugged her after a particularly successful battle and even Lady Rhea gave her the odd squeeze of the arm, but Byleth had not been raised to be physically affectionate. First and foremost, she’d been raised to be dangerous. Certainly Jeralt hadn’t raised her to get especially emotionally invested in any one person or thing, though he’d never told her _not_ to. Still, as a mercenary, you never stayed in one place for very long. One day you’d set up tent in a beautiful forest glen and the next day in a dreary bunker. People were similarly ephemeral: they came and went. Friends fought next to you in one battle and after the next you’d cart them to their graves. It was best not to care so much.

And yet here she was, caring like a sucker.

“Seriously,” Claude said when she didn’t manage to find any words, “you still with me, Teach? Do I need to go get Professor Manuela?”

“Anything but that,” Byleth muttered, her little lapse finally dispelled by the idea of full-on-physician-mode Manuela pressing her boobs into Byleth’s face — or Claude’s face — while clucking around her for signs of malicious spell-casting. “Sorry, just lost in thought.”

“I’d ask about what,” said Claude, “but I imagine I’ve depleted my daily allowance of secrets.”

“You imagine right,” Byleth said and managed a grin at the way he jokingly slumped his shoulders in feigned disappointment.

* * *

"So," Claude said, swinging his long legs across the bench opposite Lorenz and sliding his tray onto the table. Lorenz looked up from his quiche. "I hear you're looking for love."

"You hear I'm looking for love," Lorenz parroted.

"With Teach," Claude saw fit to add. "I heard that you're looking for love with Teach."

Lorenz's gaze immediately traveled across the hall and found Byleth, who was having her usual monthly staff meal with Professors Hanneman and Manuela, looking quite grim. In fairness, it was abundantly clear to everyone in the room that Hanneman and Manuela had not ceased their loud quarreling even for lunch. As it stood, Byleth was sitting far enough away that Lorenz might just feel comfortable talking about the situation — Claude had made sure of that.

He'd also made sure — with the aid of a mean and crude caricature of Manuela and a (if he did say so himself) incredibly skilled facsimile of Hanneman's signature — to incite extra reason for the already volatile pair to bicker, just to make sure Byleth was actually distracted enough to _stay_ over there. Her lunchtime peace would just have to be counted as a regrettable casualty.

"I don't know where you could possibly have heard that," said Lorenz, looking back at Claude. It wasn't an outright denial or lie and yet he sounded in equal parts guilty, defensive, and evasive.

"Oh, Hilda told me about your little deal," Claude said casually. "But it's pretty obvious. Teach has probably noticed, too."

He knew that he'd never get anywhere by telling Lorenz to back off; that would only make him redouble his efforts out of spite. But what if he could make Lorenz believe that Teach was very aware of his advances yet had chosen not to mention them, say, as a kindness? To spare him the embarrassment? That might just work.

"I doubt that," Lorenz said. "I have not gotten that far yet."

Another possibility was to convince Lorenz to do something outrageous and drastic, like serenade her in public. Worse, or maybe better, straight up propose marriage. Although that might be pretty cruel to both of them. He shelved that particular scheme.

"I don't know, Lorenz. You keep looking at her with those puppy-dog eyes. And Teach is no dummy. If she were, you wouldn't be so into her, right?"

They both turned in tandem to look at Byleth again: Manuela was grabbing her forearm with one hand and jabbing the other one into Hanneman's chest. Despite the hand grasping her arm, Byleth just kept eating. It struck Claude, not for the first time, that she really was very pretty. Objectively. Her face sort of lit up the room, but also led every other face around her to look gray and harrowed, indistinct and faded in contrast to her natural light. Maybe it was a Crest of Flames thing.

"No," Lorenz said, pointedly returning to his quiche once more. "She is not a dummy."

Claude cut a slice of his chicken thigh and chewed it thoughtfully. It wasn't usually this difficult to get Lorenz to play ball; he wasn't normally this sullen and secretive, even to Claude.

"She's not a noble, though," he said, just to say something. "Is she?"

"She has a very fine crest," Lorenz said. "I do not think anyone of importance would object if we were to become an official couple."

Hell, maybe he _shouldn't_ have shelved the marriage proposal plan. Lorenz seemed like he would be more than amenable to it.

"Yeah. Well, like I said, she's probably noticed. I bet she'll ask you out any time now."

Lorenz looked a little hopeful at his words, almost enough to make Claude feel bad. "Do you really think so?" he asked.

_No_ , thought Claude. "Yes," he said.

"I have wanted to ask her for some time now," Lorenz confessed. "But Hilda contends that I am not ready yet."

"She's a wise woman, that one," Claude said. "And very good at interpersonal relationships. Hey, maybe I should ask to be coached, too."

"You could no doubt do with it," Lorenz quickly replied, but Claude would allow him that jab.

"Yep," he just said. "Although I don't know who to aim for. Who could hold a candle to our own Teach? Why even try?"

He clutched his chest dramatically, though he obviously didn't mean it. It was true that he didn't have particular designs on anyone, but it was not true, of course, that he would ever go after his teacher. Unlike _some_ people at the table, he had personal integrity and a healthy respect for professional boundaries.

Lorenz seemed to take it as given that he was being serious, though, probably because he was so fond of Teach himself. Claude frowned: maybe this whole disentangling business would be trickier than he'd anticipated.

"You had best not think you can try to court Professor Byleth," Lorenz said.

"Wouldn't dream of it. All I said was—"

"I know what you said, Claude." Lorenz's lips seemed to thin, his eyes narrowing. "If you will not be so kind as to not try to ruin this for me, I beseech you to at least contain yourself for Hilda's sake. I'm sure she can attempt to matchmake you with someone else."

"Staked your claim, huh?" Claude tried to sound amused, but he actually found himself bristling a bit. Byleth didn't _belong_ to Lorenz, or to Hilda, for that matter. There was a noise of slammed cutlery at the other end of the hall: Manuela and Hanneman, getting to their feet simultaneously and stomping out through the exits on opposite sides of the room, leaving Byleth to deal with their half-eaten food and used trays. Claude watched her gather everything together, stacking their plates and collecting their glasses. She stood up, rubbing the bridge of her nose like she was nursing a headache, and Claude felt a sudden pang. Of what? Guilt that he'd messed with her lunch, maybe, though in fairness he'd never seen Hanneman and Manuela at the same table for much longer than five minutes without the conversation dissolving into cacophony. Still, the little gesture and the tired slump of her shoulders made him want to straight up tell Lorenz to fuck off and go over there and give her a hug. No, to apologize. He didn't know why the prospect of hugging her had popped into his mind for a moment — he really wasn't much of a hugger; hugging was the dominion of those who did not mind being emotionally vulnerable — but once there it proved unwilling to leave. It was like he could feel the soft, warm weight of her body in his arms and smell her slightly spicy scent, feel her hair tickling his nose. Whispering to her that—

What the hell was wrong with him? Maybe the chicken he was eating had turned. Lorenz was looking at him slightly weirdly.

"What?"

"I said that I have of course not 'staked my claim,' as that is a ludicrous idea, although characteristic of you and your way of thinking. Professor Byleth is her own person and can certainly make up her own mind about a prospective match."

_Except you desperately don't want me to hit on her_ , Claude thought to himself, but the hugging episode had made him feel weirdly discombobulated and so he didn't mention it. He didn't want to fight. He wanted to— he wanted— he wanted to eat his possibly-turned chicken in peace. That was all he wanted.

And so he just said, "Well, good luck," and kept eating. He'd think of another scheme for another day.


	3. Chapter 3

“Lorenz is in love with Professor Byleth,” Lysithea said one day when she and Claude were once more working together in the library, during a short, rare, Lysithea-enforced break from their studies. Claude looked at her with some disbelief, not because he thought she was wrong but because he didn’t, if he was being honest with himself, want to hear it; Lysithea, bristling, added, “What? Don’t treat me like I’m a child. I’m as insightful regarding the ways of love as anyone else.”

“I’m just surprised you’d bring it up,” he said. “What brought this on?” But when he followed Lysithea’s pointed stare bouncing between Lorenz and Byleth, he could see what she meant.

Byleth was bent over a massive old tome, her dark eyes carefully scanning the parchment pages. She was looking at some sort of complicated drawing of a glyph; she bit her full lower lip in concentration and ran a hand through her hair, scribbling something on a pad laid out next to the tome.

Claude wasn’t sure exactly why, but he didn’t want to stop watching her. And, judging by the sight that met him when he followed Lysithea’s glance to the right of Teach’s table, he wasn’t alone in that feeling: Lorenz, totally neglecting the book in front of him, was actually and ridiculously sitting with his elbows propped up on the table and his jaw leaned in his hands, seemingly just as absorbed in Teach as Teach was in whatever she was reading.

The sight annoyed him more than it had any right to, maybe simply because of Lorenz’s silly, clichéd, lovelorn pose.

“They could be a handsome couple.” There was a pondering note to Lysithea’s voice. “They’re both dark-haired and tall.”

“Teach isn’t _that_ tall,” Claude said, looking back at their professor again. And her hair, yeah, it was dark, but it was lustrous and blue, while Lorenz’s was — okay, it was also fairly lustrous, but it was purple and not all that dark. Anyway, as he said to Lysithea, “What does that even matter?”

“Just that they’d be an evenly matched pair, which is important.”

“No offense, Lys, but that might actually be the most childish thing you’ve ever said. They’re not salt-and-pepper shakers.” Claude crossed his arms. As might be expected, despite Claude’s disclaimer, Lysithea took full offense.

“How dare you tell me that I’m childish? I am not! What do you know about love, Claude? I’ve never seen you with a girlfriend.”

“I don’t _want_ a girlfriend,” Claude said. Just at that moment, Teach seemed to realize she was under observation — at least from one direction — and she tilted her face up to meet Claude’s gaze. She gave him a quizzical little smile and, for some reason, his heart in return gave a little twinge. A _twinge_ , and then it began to thud. He instinctively put his palm to his chest, like that might settle the flip of his heart, and, with a distracted smile back, tore his eyes from her and put them back on Lysithea. In the periphery, he noted Teach returned back to her reading: apparently she hadn’t noticed Lorenz’s yearning stares. His traitorous heart began pumping blood to his cheeks — he hated being caught out doing something surreptitious or semi-surreptitious and surveying someone definitely counted on that spectrum. "That's hardly," he went on, "the point."

“Right,” said Lysithea with a superior quirk of her eyebrow. She sounded like she didn’t believe him. Claude simultaneously wanted to change the subject and felt like he couldn’t let it go.

“Besides,” he said, settling on ‘not letting it go,’ “Teach is our professor. You really think she’d couple up with one of her Golden Deer? A student?”

“Perhaps if it was the right student.”

“Well, Lorenz is not the _right_ student,” Claude snapped, mimicking her tone. “And you’re wrong. Teach wouldn’t compromise her professional integrity like that.”

They both sat there for a spell, Claude not looking at Teach and Lysithea looking at her in a way that was so horrifically obvious Claude almost wanted to beg her to stop, or maybe roll in beneath the table, anything that might hide from Teach the fact that she had spent the last fifteen minutes or so working beneath the watchful eye of at least three people. What Lysithea said was principally true — she had a surprisingly keen insight into the human condition. This inability to quit staring, however, was not an example of that insight, and Claude debated with himself whether or not he should just plain ask her to give it up. He didn't like her looking at him in that way she had like she knew something he didn't, which she might well do if he mentioned it, but—

“Maybe you’re right,” Lysithea conceded in what had to be a first. “Poor Lorenz.”

_Poor Lorenz nothing_ , thought Claude to himself, but he uncrossed his arms. “Anyway,” he said instead, because he no longer wanted to talk about Lorenz or Teach or any combination of the two, “can you explain the warp thing to me? You’re saying that, once you take the Gremory exam, you could, like, materialize Hilda or someone straight into the middle of a battle? I don't believe that for a second. Not a single second.”

Lysithea, successfully distracted, was only too happy to tell him that he was wrong.

* * *

"I didn't pick that dress for Professor Byleth so that you could ogle her instead of doing your work," Hilda greeted Lorenz as she, after the most cursory of knocks, stalked past him into his room.

"Hilda! What dress? Oh."

Apparently she'd interrupted some little tea party, judging from an intricate set-up of the cutest sun yellow porcelain cups and pots you ever did see. There was nobody else there, though, and the tea had not been poured. A solo tea party, then. Lorenz had jumped to his feet when Hilda barged in, but, on seeing it was just her, he sat back down. He gestured for her to sit at the other side of the table and even poured her a cup before he poured himself one.

"You picked the dress," he said after a slow sip. "I see."

"Claude says you were drooling over her," Hilda said, though her anger felt like it was melting away a bit in the rising steam from the tea.

"Claude says what?" Lorenz's eyes narrowed. "Of course he would say that. He speaks little but lies. Of course I wasn't drooling over Professor Byleth, Hilda. Though she looked very fetching, she had enough of that kind of thing from other corners. I wouldn't dream of making her feel uncomfortable like that. Truly."

The thing was, Lorenz didn't usually lie, Hilda had come to realize. Sometimes he was almost painfully earnest. Maybe Claude _had_ massaged the truth a little bit, or maybe he'd misunderstood. She also naturally would not have suggested that Professor Byleth wear the dress if she had thought Lorenz was likely to act very weird about it, and her instincts were usually pretty good. If she'd thought Lorenz was a hopeless cause, she wouldn't have offered her coaching services — she wouldn’t have tried to set him up with Byleth at all.

"Really?" she said, just to make sure. She took a small draft of Lorenz's favorite bergamot tea and let its citrus tones coat her palate. It was nicer to drink tea in a careful, measured way than to admit you'd been wrong about something.

"Hilda, of course."

"Okay," Hilda said. It began to dawn on her that it probably hadn't even been a misunderstanding. She remembered the amused set of Claude's mouth when she'd told him about her plans and she remembered his words: _Over my dead body is Lorenz getting together with Teach._ Yeah, he would probably quite gladly try to sow discord between Lorenz and his dating coach.

Quite, quite gladly.

She wouldn't let him put her off course, though! Instead, she tilted her head slightly to the side and said, "I believe you."

"But I confess I don't follow," said Lorenz. He held out a platter of thin, green, petal-shaped cookies to Hilda and only took one for himself after she’d selected one. "Why _did_ you suggest she wear that outfit?"

Hilda found she couldn't really answer that. It wasn't like Lorenz needed more of an excuse to enjoy the sight of Professor Byleth; he seemed pretty into her as it was. Thinking it over, she felt suddenly foolish, even somehow guilty, though she wouldn't admit to that in a hurry.

"I thought she'd look cute," she said a little evasively and took a small bite of her quite hard and not very flavorful cookie. No matter: she'd eat a thousand hard and virtually flavorless cookies if it meant she didn't have to meditate on her sometimes impetuous choices.

"She looked breathtaking," Lorenz said and seemed lost in thought for a moment. He shook his head and said, "But you didn't need to do it for me. She'd look beautiful in anything. That dress you're wearing, for instance."

"Me?" Hilda was wearing one of her weekend dresses: something that was more comfortable than showy, although it was still a pleasing shade of blush, nipped in at the waist with a swingy skirt. "This old thing?" She wasn't even being coy; it was probably the oldest dress in her closet, or near enough.

"Yes, it's a very arresting look." Lorenz looked her up and down, though not in a lecherous way at all. "It suits you well. Better even than it would suit the professor, I think. You look particularly striking in pink."

Though his words were dispassionate, Hilda felt her cheeks stinging a little at the compliment, just because it was so casually delivered that there seemed to be little doubt Lorenz meant it.

"Well…" she said quietly, not exactly, right at that moment, feeling deserving of much praise. "Thank you, Lorenz. That's kind of you to say."

"Not at all; it is just the truth. Now tell me, Hilda, how do you like the cookies Ferdinand baked?"

Chewing them felt like a lot of jaw work for not that much reward. Hilda said, "They're not very sweet."

"You wouldn't want them to be. It would detract from the delicacy of the tea."

"Yeah, but cookies should taste of _some_ thing."

"Quite so." Lorenz nodded and crunched down on another petal. You had it to give it to Ferdinand: even if the cookies didn't taste like much, they were beautiful of shape and color. "Well, then, what do you think of the tea?"

Hilda took another sip.

"It's bergamot," she said, "but it's not the usual one, right? It's a little less bitter. A little more… floral?"

Lorenz smiled at her as she let the liquid roll around in her mouth the way he'd shown her.

"Yes, floral," she settled on, swallowing her mouthful. "Sweeter. Softer. Is it a different blend?"

"It is a cherry blossom and bergamot hybrid," Lorenz said and toasted Hilda with his teacup in a gesture that was surprisingly cute. "You've gotten very good at this."

"Maybe,” Hilda said, returning his smile. “I've actually had a very good teacher.”

* * *

"Claude, what are you doing with all those bottles of liquor?" Dimitri asked Claude, sounding faintly scandalized, as he caught Claude, Raphael, and Claude's favorite castle guard Gideon carting back several heavy crates from the market to Garreg Mach.

"Blondie, my friend, it is Teach's birthday. And on Teach's birthday, we _drink_!"

Dimitri said something else, about Professor Byleth's approval or lack thereof, but Claude ignored it. These boxes were not light and they needed to get them to Teach's room before she came back from her Saturday afternoon wyvern ride.

“You can come by if you want,” he shouted behind him as he, with a deep inhale, began to ascend the stairs to the monastery. “Have a drink. It’s on me.”

He winked at Dimitri, because it was always funny to see him look taken aback. When they reached Teach’s room, it turned out a small decorating committee had descended on it. Lysithea was joined by Marianne in casting magic stars onto the ceilings, already beginning to sparkle in the low autumn light; Petra was festooning the walls with colorful Brigidian flags; Ashe seemed to mostly be dusting and contributing encouraging yelps each time Marianne or Lysithea twisted their fingers to dispatch another star. Teach’s room was maybe a little small for all of them, Claude reflected, especially since he hadn’t kept the invitation limited to Golden Deer students. Maybe they could just prop the door open and let everyone spill out onto the lawns. Yeah, Seteth would probably throw a fit and Lady Rhea might act weird about it, but when didn’t Seteth throw a fit and when didn’t that shady woman act weird?

In service of that idea, Claude used his honestly way too heavy box to keep the door pushed up against the wall. Gideon the castle guard, somehow nowhere near as out of breath as Claude, deposited his own large crate of clinking bottles on the floor next to Teach’s bed.

“You can come, too,” Claude said to him. “And bring your friend. That really cheerful guy outside the main doors, oh, man, what’s his name, it’s on the tip of my tongue...”

He’d never actually learned the guy’s name and by this point it was far too late to ask. Gideon, a stoic fellow, left with a nod and some little murmur of possible assent, but Claude’s attention was diverted by Raphael slamming his own crate onto Teach’s desk, sending a bunch of stuff flying. Luckily, none of the ink bottles broke, though a number of pens rolled in beneath the bed — Lysithea, grumbling all the while, crouched down to crawl in and fetch them. Claude’s attention was regrettably diverted from the pen-saving mission, too, however: among all the other little items that had been sent careening around the room, a leather-bound journal had fallen onto the floor. Open. Face-up.

His first instinct was to read it, of course; how could he not want to read it? His second instinct, which he hewed to with some reluctance, was to close it and put it back onto the desk. Yeah, he’d love to delve into Teach’s secrets and thoughts, but not like this. Still, he read quick as a wink — a skill both innate and carefully honed — and his eyes, independent of any conscious decision, skittered across the pages as he picked up the book to shut it. Before he could slam the covers shut, he caught his own name, right there in Teach’s none too easily decipherable scrawl.

Ignatz's name was there, too; the writing seemed to focus on the walk they'd taken the other week. Claude didn't care about Ignatz, he cared about the fact that Teach's pen had swept down the large C of his name, the low loop of the E, even though it wasn't the first time she'd done it and he'd never much thought about it when it involved her notes on one of his essays. Maybe he just cared about the fact that his (and, sure, Ignatz's) walk with her hadn't passed her by totally unnoticed. _Well, why does that matter?_ he asked himself, but managed to produce no satisfactory answer. He did think idly that if he were the type of man to keep a journal (which he wasn't — a written record of all your thoughts and feelings left you very vulnerable to other people partaking in those thoughts and feelings; case, he supposed, in point the fact that he'd accidentally stumbled upon Teach's) he would also have mentioned the walk.

But he refused to keep thinking about it. What use was ultimately pointless self-interrogation when there was party planning to be done?

After some more stars and flag garlands, and after the unpacking of many, many bottles of alcohol, and after the liberation (fine, theft) of many, many glasses from the dining hall, and after they’d as a group wrapped a small mountain of birthday presents, the monastery bells pealed six times over. Teach didn’t always act like she was especially beholden to time, but Claude had noticed that she usually arrived back from her day trips around six or so, so, accompanied by the somber but harmonious tune of church bells ringing, he gestured to the other gathered students.

“Okay, hide.”

“Hide?” said Petra. “Where are we supposed to be hiding? There is no room for all of us to make ourselves hidden, Claude.”

“Well, just—” He pointed behind the door and beneath the desk; to the corner of the room; to some wooden boxes stacked up on the walkway outside. They weren’t tall, but they would probably just about cover Lysithea or Hilda.

“I do not think Professor Byleth would be wanting us hidden,” Petra said. “She has extreme vigilance.”

Was surprise birthday party hiding just an Almyran custom? Or was it simply not a thing that happened in Brigid, specifically? Either way, Claude relented with a nod.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said, because she probably was. He imagined you didn’t become a mercenary out of love for people hiding and jumping out at you.

And when Claude saw how genuinely happy Teach looked to see them all gathered — even before they shouted ‘Surprise!’ and she realized why they were actually there — yeah, he wouldn’t have traded that light in her eyes for anything.

* * *

Byleth was under no circumstances going to attend even a surprise birthday party in her wyvern riding gear — she’d never been the recipient of a surprise birthday party before, but she suspected that mud-splattered shirts did not count among its customary attire — and so made everyone vacate her room except Hilda.

“Pick something for me to wear,” she said. “Please?”

Hilda brushed her bangs out of her eyes, a little wide-eyed at the request.

“Me? Aren’t you worried I’m going to pick something…”

“No, not particularly,” Byleth said when Hilda trailed off. “Should I be?”

“No,” Hilda hastened to say, but then, with an uncertain note to her voice, amended it to: “I mean, I did before. That one time.”

“Yeah,” Byleth said — she obviously knew what Hilda was referring to, even though she was tiptoeing around it like a castle cat around a cold water puddle — “but this time it’s a party. And, out of everyone at Garreg Mach, I trust you to be able to make me look good.”

She pointed to the closet and sat down in her desk chair, face to face with a truly magnificent assortment of glittering bottles in every jewel color you could possibly ask for, from the deepest garnet to the lightest periwinkle. It was very impressive; even Jeralt would surely think it beautiful, if more for the range of liquor on offer than from the way the ceiling starlights filtered through the bottles to paint rainbows all over the walls. Hilda, meanwhile, was rummaging around the nowhere-near-as-magnificent assortment of clothes in Byleth’s possession, half inside the closet and half out of it. After a few noises of deliberation, she proclaimed, “I’ve got it!” and turned back around toward Byleth, who was still admiring the way the bottles and the light made it seem all of a sudden like she was sitting in a room ringed with stained glass.

“Are you wearing make-up?” she asked innocently. Too innocently. “You’re not, are you? Can I put some on?”

Byleth didn’t regularly bother with make-up, and on a normal day she might have turned the offer down, but this time she decided to let Hilda have her way with her. Your birthday only came around once a year, after all, and it wasn’t like she’d ever celebrated it much before. What harm could there be in letting Hilda gussy her up a bit?

* * *

When Professor Byleth and Hilda finally exited Byleth’s room, she looked beautiful, Lorenz thought. Exquisite. Well, they both did, but of course he’d already seen what Hilda was wearing; she’d even asked him for advice on which dress to pick and what color lipstick, although she’d subsequently rejected his suggestion of red.

(He hadn’t even known there were other lipstick colors, frankly, but it turned out Hilda owned a whole assortment of pinks and browns and everything in between.)

Hilda had dressed Professor Byleth in a short, slightly shimmery, dark blue sheath, which looked very good with her dark hair. She’d even managed to dig out a slightly more delicate shoe than the gigantic pair of boots Byleth usually favored in, and also out of, combat situations; between the length of the skirt and the heel, Byleth’s legs seemed to go on for ages. Years. Eons. She was wearing some manner of cosmetics, too, Lorenz thought, although again he could hardly be said to be any kind of an authority on that type of thing, as the lipstick business had shown him. Professor Byleth’s eyes looked very sultry and large, however, outlined with something smokey and dark, sort of like charcoal; her cheeks looked unusually flushed, although that might just be excitement; and — yes! — she was definitely wearing something on her lips, something sort of glowy and glossy.

Hilda looked a bit like Ignatz did when he presented a new painting: faintly embarrassed to show off her work, yet also proud of the results of a laborious process. Honestly, she _should_ be proud. Both she and Professor Byleth looked incredible. It made Lorenz feel suddenly self-conscious; he was very glad he’d starched and ironed his best shirt and that he’d managed to procure a new silk rose for his lapel.

Claude rounded the corner and made a noise like he’d been stabbed, which was just so typical of him. Why he was making that particular noise was anyone’s guess, but Byleth, Lorenz supposed, hadn’t heard it — if she had, she surely wouldn’t have walked up to him with a smile and started chatting with him like it was a completely regular Saturday evening.

Had Claude not been there, Lorenz would maybe have started talking to the birthday girl himself. As it was, he chose instead to go and make himself and Hilda a drink.

* * *

Byleth was a little taken aback at all the length her students had gone to in arranging this — and, though she was sure he’d never admit to it, she knew Claude had to have been the key player in setting it up, as house leader. There was such a crowd, too! People from all houses — people who weren’t part of the Officers Academy, even — were milling about with drinks and big goofy smiles, wishing her happy birthday, throwing their dorm room doors open to provide extra seating, snacking on Ashe-provided canapés. Changed out of their academy uniforms, everyone looked happier, somehow, and more themselves. Byleth’s eyes alit on Claude, broad-shouldered in a pale yellow shirt sewn with golden embroidery: an abstract but skillfully rendered depiction of a deer in the woods on thin stripes in the background.

It was an impressive garment, but she couldn’t be standing there staring at her student’s chest, even if she wasn’t pondering its broadness or strength as much so the embroidery that clad it. Still. Feeling slightly awkward, she looked up at his face instead, meeting his laughing green eyes. He kindly did not mention her lapse into staring, if he’d noticed it.

* * *

"Let me get you a drink, Teach.” Claude wasn't _distracted_ by the way Byleth looked. Not exactly. He was surprised, that was all, honestly, and that was the only reason he couldn’t really stop looking. “It's your birthday, you should cut loose."

"That’d be nice," Byleth said. “Thank you, Claude.”

"What's your poison?"

"Don't ask a mercenary that.” There was a funny lilt to her voice as she spoke; she smiled at him. “You might get a genuine answer."

Claude chuckled, but still waited for her to elaborate.

"I don't know,” she said. “Something strong and bitter."

"Strong and bitter, huh? I was going to make a joke about fetching you Lorenz, but he's not that strong."

Byleth laughed in surprise, though there was something in the way her mouth moved that made him think she was reproaching herself for laughing. Really, Claude probably shouldn't be making fun of Lorenz behind his back, but it was so genuinely hard not to sometimes, particularly under these new circumstances.

"Have you seen him on a horse with a lance in one hand and a tome in the other?" she said, flicking Claude a glance he couldn't quite interpret. "Lorenz is plenty strong."

"Yeah, yeah. We're all strong, aren't we? All your Golden Deer, I mean."

"You are. And if you get me that drink, you might even be able to finagle more specific compliments out of me."

"That," said Claude, "I wouldn't miss for the world. So. Strong and bitter and… brown? Really lethal liquor is usually brown, right?"

"Got it in one."

"I think I'll join you for that."

"You can try, but I've drunk bigger men than you under the table."

She winked at Claude — that was in itself a surprising development; he didn't think he'd ever seen Teach wink — and he couldn't stop himself from smirking.

"Game on, Teach," he said. "Game on."

* * *

Byleth gratefully took the glass Claude handed her on his return. He had indeed managed to find her something bitter and strong, herbal and horrible in just the bracing way she liked it. Though he'd picked the same thing for himself, he choked on his first glug.

"Damn, Teach," he said, almost sputtered. "This is your drink of choice? I'm not sure if I should be impressed or worried."

"Too strong?" Byleth said, narrowing her eyes at him playfully.

"Too… I don't even know. I think my liver just flipped me the bird."

"If you think your liver would prefer, it looks like Raphael is making fruity cocktails." She indicated an impromptu bar situation to her left, where Raphael and a large bowl of chopped up fruit and a few bottles were clinking away on top of an overturned trunk.

"No, it's your birthday, Teach. Far be it from me to turn your toxic drink down."

He lifted his glass; Byleth touched hers to his.

"But," he continued after another sip, "the next one might be a fruity cocktail."

"Deal. We'll alternate."

The way she said it, Byleth reflected briefly, made it sound a little like she'd just signed Claude up to spend the entire night by her side, which he of course didn't have to. She was too happy to think about it much, though, and though Claude was free to turn her down he didn't say anything to that effect, he just grinned his big Claude grin at her. A sort of _heat_ seemed to twist inside her, a coil tightening and untightening. It wasn’t something she'd ever previously experienced while drinking, but booze could do a lot of strange things to you; everyone knew that. Dark magic in a bottle, Alois liked to call it, though Byleth refused on principle to recall whatever groan-worthy pun he tried to wring out of that one.

They finished their drinks — Claude, all credit to him, with minimal coughing — and wandered over to Raphael. Byleth had to fend off a strange impulse to take Claude by the hand as they strode. Another couple of drinks in, she realized, she probably would have. On the road with Jeralt and their ever-shifting gang of mercenary comrades, Byleth used to drink plenty, even back when she was technically probably too young for the bottle. Now, though, it had been a while since she had had, well, much of anything, and she felt like such a lightweight: the alcohol went to her head at once.

Raphael’s huge bear paw pressed a tall glass of what looked like half a fruit salad in pink juice into Byleth’s hand before she could get out as much as a ‘hello.’

“Professor!” he called. “Happy birthday! Are we giving her her presents?"

"Presents?" said Byleth. She tasted the fruit salad: in a lot of ways it was indeed more palatable than her brown drink. Claude definitely seemed happier with this one.

"You didn't think we'd throw you a party without bringing presents, did you?" Claude shook his head in mock dismay. "We come bearing gifts, Teach. Many gifts."

Raphael struck up the Fódlan birthday hymn in a surprisingly beautiful basso profundo. Claude soon joined in and then all of a sudden Byleth was surrounded by students — first Golden Deer, then Blue Lions and Black Eagles — singing. It was a first for her to have her birthday celebrated like this; on the road, celebrations had been so few and far between that she barely even recognized all the words to the birthday hymn. She didn't know what to do with herself in the face of the choir of voices, not what to say nor where to look, so she fixed her eyes on her unusually well-shod feet, but she couldn't stop smiling.

"Thank you," she said once the song had ended. "I can't— thank you so much. All of you."

She buried her face in her fruit salad drink, sucking down a huge gulp in lieu of trying for a speech and fucking it up, and the students just grinned back at her. Eyes glittering, they began to scatter to dig out presents from wherever they’d stashed them, in bushes or in pockets or beneath strategically placed jackets and coats, else sped off to their dorm rooms and back.

"For you, Professor," Marianne said so quietly her voice barely cleaved the night. She handed Byleth a gift wrapped in unassuming brown paper. "For your wyvern."

Byleth unwrapped the package carefully to discover a new harness of rich blue leather, sturdy yet supple. She gasped in delight, taking a strap between thumb and index finger and running it through her grasp.

"Marianne, you shouldn't have," she said. "But Estrid will love this. And so do I. Thank you."

Marianne shot her a shy smile and ceded the way for Leonie, who'd gotten her a complicated-looking and quite beautiful lure for her fishing rod, with a promise that she'd teach Byleth to fish. Byleth found herself really looking forward to it, despite the fact that she normally hated fishing.

"On behalf of all of Blue Lion house," said Ashe as he and Ingrid handed Byleth what turned out to be a book of old knight's fables, full of illustrations that ranged from the breathtaking to the hilarious. Byleth didn't even know what to say, faced with such a breadth of people who'd want to give her birthday presents, who'd remembered her birthday at all. She almost felt a bit choked up, a feeling not aided by the constant supply of drinks being passed her way for toasts. (The fruit salad was long since gone. Currently she was drinking something bubbly and pale violet.) Caspar gave her some grip bands for the handle of her axe and Linhardt trailed after him with a clearly somewhat improvised yet equally clearly heartfelt list of the best places in the monastery and its grounds to take uninterrupted naps.

"I hope you like this, professor," Ignatz said, coming up to her with a package so large it nearly obscured him. She took it from him, uncertain how to deal with such an unwieldy thing, but finally propping it up on top of a window sill the way he indicated. Beneath the wrapping paper was a painting of a very green day in a very green forest. Up in the trees were flecks of red: squirrels waiting on branches for the three people in the picture to pass. The three were walking a winding path, seen from the front, or three-quarters from the front, at least: Claude and Ignatz and herself. Claude was grinning or laughing, maybe in the process of telling a joke; Ignatz looked a little shy; she herself looked absolutely blissed out in a way she didn't primarily associate with her own face. Still, she could readily believe she'd looked that way that day. It had been such a good walk.

And Ignatz had captured it exactly. She looked at the painting, awed.

"This is beautiful, Ignatz," she breathed. "You're so good."

"Really?"

"Yes! I can't believe how good it is! It's perfect!" The mix of booze and just plain touchedness (was that a word? Was it the word she _wanted_?) made her emotions somehow more accessible to her than usual and she beamed at him. He smiled back, meeting her eye for a second before looking away, abashed.

"Looking amazing, Ignatz," said Claude as he, flanked by Lorenz and Hilda, strolled up. "That's you and me and Teach, all right."

He looked between the three faces in the painting, then between Ignatz and Byleth.

"Teach looks pretty as a picture and you look handsome as ever, but I think you've done me more justice than I deserve!" he said, with a friendly arm slung around Ignats’s shoulder and a laugh. "Is my chest really that broad? Is my smile really that dazzling?"

"Ugh, Claude," said Hilda, "stop fishing for compliments." She nudged him with her elbow. "Open _our_ present, professor!"

She extended a gift impeccably wrapped in white paper painted with roses and Byleth took it.

"From you three?"

"From Hilda and Lorenz, I guess," said Claude, sounding a little contemplative. He eyed the parcel. "I had nothing to do with it, Teach, and I don't know what it is. Just so you know." His quiet voice rallied as he continued, “Just in case it explodes.”

“Gotcha,” Byleth said. “For once in his life, Claude is not involved with any prospective explosions.”

She gave him a jokey salute and began undoing the ribbon and paper. Inside was a box and a note which read, in Lorenz’s careful cursive, ‘For our dear professor who doesn’t like tea.’

Byleth looked up at the pair.

“We were trying to determine what kind of tea you like,” said Lorenz, “since that is always a nice present to receive. Even Claude thinks so.”

“Guilty as charged?” Claude said. “I guess?”

“Well, yeah." Hilda picked up the subject. "So we were trying to remember what kind of tea you usually like to drink, but you always offer us whatever we like, right? Like you make sure to get Lorenz his Seiros tea.” Lorenz nodded with gratitude. “And you get Claude that weird, smoky Almyran pine stuff that tastes like trees.”

“Delicious trees,” Claude supplied.

“It’s not bad,” Byleth said. It was okay. Well, at least it was better than most teas.

“And then we realized… you don’t even drink the tea! You only have a couple of sips to be companionable.”

“It is true,” Lorenz said, “that your cup always seems half-full, even as ours are drained and refilled.”

Hilda began to count on her fingers. “You don’t like tea, but you put up with it for us. You don’t like sweet things very much at all. Earlier tonight, I overheard Claude telling someone that he was looking for the most bitter alcohol possible, because that’s what you like to drink. But, even before that, Lorenz picked out the perfect present for you. Open it!”

Byleth duly opened the box and inhaled as a buttery waft came toward her. It was packed full of beautiful coffee beans, the likes of which she hadn’t seen for what felt like years, maybe ever. Uniform like pebbles and gleaming brown, their deep roasted fragrance made her want to book it to the nearest grinder at once.

“You’re right,” she said, almost dazzled, “this is the perfect present. I didn’t know you were such sleuths.”

“Neither did I,” said Claude. “Consider me reluctantly impressed.”

_Reluctantly?_ But Byleth didn’t dwell on it. She put one hand on Ignatz’s arm and one on Lorenz’s and said, “Maybe you could all join me for a coffee tomorrow. Well, you can have tea, but I’ll have coffee.”

“I’d like that very much, professor,” Ignatz said.

Hilda wore a slightly complicated expression, but she agreed, “Yes! It’s a date!”

Byleth looked at herself in the painting. She glanced down into the box of coffee beans she was holding.

“Really, _all_ of these presents are perfect,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve all this.”

“Oh, you’re an incredible teacher, for one,” Claude said. “We’re gonna slaughter the other houses in the Battle of the Eagle and Lion at the end of the month. And you’re a good friend. And we thought we might be able to score some excellent grades out of all this. Speaking of which,” he went on as Byleth laughed, “here’s a present from all us Golden Deer for you. Happy birthday, Teach.”

“Oh no,” Hilda said. “That one’s all Claude, we’ve heard nothing about this. Just in case it explodes. Isn’t that right, Claude?”

“I may have picked it out, but it’s from all your Golden Deer. And I can almost definitely promise it’s not going to explode.”

It didn’t explode, not even close: it was a small leather pouch and, inside the pouch, a piece of jewelry, something between a bangle and a bracelet. It was made of gold so deep it gleamed like fire, lit from within, and it was set with green gems, both ones that were cut and ones that had been left raw. On the inside, where the bangle would rest against her wrist, the metal had been engraved with the Golden Deer insignia.

“Claude,” she said. Just that, just his name. The gems and the gold glowed like they were sucking up all the light in the world and throwing it back out at her. She didn’t own tons of jewelry and didn’t know much about it, but it would be plain to anyone looking that this was very special — of course it was, because Claude had picked it for her. Maybe, she thought, her eyes tracing the Golden Deer insignia, he’d even had it made.

“Do you like it, Teach?” Claude asked, voice hopeful, maybe a little uncertain. Byleth just nodded, because she barely trusted her own voice not to warble and split. She managed to make herself look up at him and nodded again, more insistently.

“I love it,” she finally said, though it came out more like a croak than anything else. “Will you…?”

She extended her hand to Claude. He took the bracelet from her and carefully put it on her; she suppressed something like a shiver at the feel of his quick, deft fingers on her skin, at the weight of the cold metal closing around her wrist.

The bracelet fit perfectly. Byleth resolved, right then and there, never to take it off.

* * *

"Can we dance?"

"Dance? But there's no music." Claude grinned at Byleth and said, "You're tipsy, Teach."

“No, I’m not,” she said and laughed a decidedly tipsy laugh. “We can fix music, can’t we? Sylvain plays the guitar. Annette plays something, I think. The flute.”

“We’re not gonna dance to the flute,” Claude said, but looked over his shoulder at Sylvain who was intently trying to explain something to Ingrid and shouted, “Hey, Sylvain! Go get your guitar!” He was, he was beginning to realize, quite tipsy, too.

Sylvain looked a bit annoyed to be interrupted (and, though Claude hadn’t expected her to, Ingrid looked a little annoyed that he’d been interrupted, as well) but when he saw the big happy smile on Teach’s usually tightly controlled face, he laughed.

“For you, Claude, nothing,” he said. “And for you, Professor Byleth, anything.”

He slouched off and Ingrid came over to them instead, smiling just as sloppily as Teach. Who knew _Ingrid_ could get drunk? She full-on threw herself into Teach’s arms and Teach caught her, squeezing her back as she squeezed.

“Happy birthday, professor!” Ingrid said, stumbling over her words just slightly and stumbling as she got back on her feet. “I’m so glad you came to Garreg Mach.”

“So am I,” said Byleth. “So glad.”

“I just wish you’d asked to head the Blue Lions instead. What do the Golden Deer have that we don’t?”

“Nothing—”

“What does he—” Ingrid pointed at Claude— “have that Dimitri doesn’t?” She turned and pointed at Blondie with her full extended arm; Blondie, cornered by an excitedly shouting Caspar, glanced at her uneasily but either did not attempt to extricate himself from the conversation or did not succeed.

“Dimitri’s great,” Teach said, stumbling over her own words a tiny bit, “you’re all great, but who could resist Claude’s charms?”

She reached out and put her palm on Claude’s lower back; even through his shirt, the touch felt like it was scorching him, burning him, branding him. Ingrid looked him up and down like she could think of at least one person who could resist his charms, but he barely noticed — his world had swiftly and suddenly narrowed down to just that one hand. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it didn’t take her long to remove it again. Weirdly, she removed it in service of giving Ingrid another hug. Teach giving out hugs voluntarily? What had the world come to?

“You can join my class!” she said. “Like Petra. We’d love it if you joined, wouldn’t we, Claude?”

“Yeah,” Claude said, and it was true that he liked Ingrid a lot, or at least liked to tease her a lot, but his mind was elsewhere.

“But…” Ingrid sounded hesitant. Behind them, Sylvain was walking up with his guitar slung across his chest. Teach turned to check what, or who, Ingrid was looking at.

“Sylvain can come, too,” she said; Sylvain caught that bit.

“Sylvain can come?” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “Don’t mind if I do.”

“That innuendo is a new and nonsensical low,” Claude said, “even for you.”

But they laughed, all four of them. Sylvain hoisted his guitar in the air and said, “Any requests?”

“Something you can dance to?” said Teach.

“A tall order,” Sylvain said, “but I’ll do my best.” His face fell a bit. “Hey, how am I supposed to be able to dance with all the pretty girls here if I’m the one providing the music?”

“You’re not,” Claude said, trying and failing to sound serious. “That was part of the plan.”

“Ouch. _Ouch._ But, well, like I said before, professor, anything for you. Have at it!” He strummed a chord.

After debating with himself for a split second about the wisdom of asking Teach to dance after even the brief touch of her hand on his back had incinerated every single thought he’d ever had or been likely to have, but finally settling on that just being a momentary blip, Claude turned toward her, but apparently that one split second made him too late: Ingrid had gotten there first.

“May I have this dance?” she asked Byleth, who seemed very pleased to be asked and very pleased to say yes.

“Save the next one for me?” she called to Claude as she walked off hand-in-hand with Ingrid.

He watched her go, her face incandescent as she looked over her shoulder and fired him a smile and her choppy hair as dark as the night. Somewhere deep inside, though he tried to tamper it down, Claude felt as though he’d happily save _every_ dance for her.

* * *

"What a night, huh?" came a voice almost directly into Hilda's ear. Despite the proximity, it took her a little too long to realize the words were directed to her. Well, she was a bit distracted, what could she say?

"Yes," she said and turned to look at the man who'd spoken to her — no one she knew. Maybe a student in a different year or a knight in training. Light-haired and broad-shouldered, he was cute enough, if you liked that type.

Hilda didn't like that type, not particularly. She turned her attention back to Lorenz, who was in the process of whirling Professor Byleth around the impromptu dance floor.

"She must be quite a teacher," the man said, "for her students to pull out all the stops like this."

"Yeah, I mean, she's really sweet," said Hilda. Was 'sweet' really the word for it? She tried again: "Interesting. Nice. A great professor. We've learned a lot."

Despite her best attempts not to, but she chose not to say that.

Lorenz was a skilled dancer, way better than Hilda had anticipated. With a bit of wistfulness, which was probably the usual emotion that accompanied the feeling of a job well done, she noted to herself that him and the professor made a really fine pair. Lorenz looked stately and handsome in his crisp shirt, though his face was very serious in contrast with Byleth's big smile. They were talking a little — something Byleth said made Lorenz smile back at her — but Hilda couldn't quite make out what they were saying. She especially couldn't make out what they were saying when the blond guy started chatting to her again, still right up in her ear.

"I'm Anton," he said. "New here."

"Welcome," Hilda said, not quite managing to shake her distraction, though she gave it a solid go. "What do you…?" She didn't know what to ask, though it didn't seem to matter; Anton appeared to be more than equipped to carry on somewhere between one and two sides of a conversation.

"Yes, new here. Very new. Difficult to find my way around a place like this. Perhaps you know of someone who could help me?"

"Help you find your way?" Garreg Mach wasn't _that_ big. Maybe he had some sort of disorder. He didn't really look like he did, but who could say?

"Someone who could show me around." He took a half step towards her, positioning himself squarely in her field of vision. "What's your name, Lady Pink?"

"Hilda."

"Do you want to dance, Hilda?"

"Oh, um, sure!"

He took her by the hand fairly gallantly and escorted her out onto the lawn, where her heels stabbed hole after hole into the dewy grass. The greenhouse keeper was going to rip the party-goers to shreds in the morning, she had time to think before Anton started to lead.

He wasn't a bad dancer, just a determined one; he steered her around the premises like he was trying to right a ship on stormy seas. Hilda didn't mind that much — less need to think about the dancing left her more space to think about other things. As it happened, dancing was one of Hilda’s favorite things to do, be it solo shuffling or ballroom dancing, and it didn’t take her too long to settle into the tempo Anton set. She allowed herself to simply have fun — the ‘more space to think about other things’ melted away until she wasn’t thinking a lot at all, just moving and feeling.

At least until a minor commotion off to Hilda’s side wrecked her moment of calm: she spun around just in time to see Ignatz, blissfully unaware of his surroundings and moving quicker than Hilda thought the music warranted, dance straight into Professor Byleth. The momentum of his unintentional shove coupled with the tall and very slim heel Byleth was wearing, to say nothing of the slippery grass beneath those wobbly heels, sent her careening into Lorenz. They both fell over; Lorenz first and Byleth on top of him. One of her hands still clutched his; the other one had not quite managed to break her fall — she was mashed against him, almost face to face.

Though Anton kept trying to pull her along, Hilda stopped and stood as if rooted to the ground, staring. On Professor Byleth and Lorenz’s other side, dancing with some castle guard Hilda didn’t recognize, Claude too had frozen; they exchanged a sort of uneasy glance, totally unwilling on Hilda’s part.

Yeah, uneasy was the word for it — that’s how Hilda felt as she looked down at the pair. Should she go help Byleth up? Or should she regard this as a prime opportunity for Lorenz to showcase his gentlemanly ways, for Byleth to feel his actually quite muscular yet lean body beneath her own? Her instinct was definitely to run over and make sure Byleth got back on her feet as soon as possible, but maybe that wasn’t the way to go. Time seemed to stand still. If not for the fact that Professor Byleth’s eyelashes swept her upper cheekbones each time she blinked and the way Lorenz’s lips moved minutely like he was trying to phrase something but didn’t know how, it actually could have been standing still: a spell cast to keep them in this insufferable moment. Hilda’s body ached like a fist had been slammed onto her chin or into her stomach — she almost felt a little sick. Even Ignatz seemed shocked into paralysis for a second, though soon enough he started babbling apologies. Jolted into action, he nevertheless didn’t manage to help Byleth to her feet before Claude was there, stretching out his hand to her.

Byleth took it and stood; from Hilda’s vantage point, she looked a little embarrassed to have slipped, but she played her stumble off with a laugh. It wasn’t her fault anyway, obviously; it was Ignatz’s. Or maybe Hilda’s, for finding Byleth those amazing, covetable shoes that had no business trying to keep traction on a wet lawn. Rudely, Claude was just ignoring Lorenz there on the ground in favor of looking at Professor Byleth tenderly like she was a cherished porcelain bird and he was scanning her for cracks — like, what was _that_ about? — so, with a mumbled quick excuse to Anton, Hilda walked over to Lorenz and kneeled down next to him. She barely even grimaced at the way the cold grass felt against her knees soaking through her stockings; she just plucked a tiny leaf away from the crown of his head and said, “Okay there, Lorenz?”

“Hilda!” Lorenz said. He allowed her to help him into a sitting, then a standing, position. “I apologize that you had to bear witness to that… that…”

“It was hardly your fault,” Hilda said at the same time Professor Byleth said, “I’m so sorry, Lorenz. I hope I didn’t— I’m sorry for landing on you.”

Byleth reached out a slightly shaky hand around him and began brushing some stray grass off of his shoulders and his back. Another stripe of pain lashed through Hilda; she looked at the green stains forming on Lorenz’s shirt, there beneath Professor Byleth’s caressing hand. He’d never get those out, no matter how much he tried to sweet-talk whoever was on laundry duty.

“I’m so clumsy,” she said, though Hilda didn’t think that was true. “I’m afraid I’m not a very good dancer.”

“Not at all,” said Lorenz graciously. “You are a very able dancer and an excellent partner.”

“It was my fault,” Ignatz said, near slurred, in a kind of tormented voice. “I’m very sorry, professor. And Lorenz.”

“Actually,” Hilda said, uncharacteristically willing to share in the blame, “it was _my_ fault. You look really cute in those shoes, professor, but I guess they’re not that great for dancing.”

Everyone — Claude; Ignatz; Lorenz; Anton, who’d apparently joined them at some point — looked at Professor Byleth’s shoes and, subsequently and in sync, let their eyes travel up her legs, like some slightly seedy puppet-master was pulling all of their strings at once. That had not been Hilda’s intention at all and she coughed angrily to pull their attention back to her — not because she particularly wanted most of their attention, but because she’d learned her lesson with the dress. Claude looked guilty and uncomfortable, wrong-footed; Ignatz looked a little sheepish but mostly just drunk; Anton muttered something about finding refreshments and left; Lorenz moved his eyes to Hilda like he’d just as happily gaze at her as at their professor’s legs.

Which was silly, obviously, because Lorenz was really, _really_ into Professor Byleth and even Hilda could see she actually did have great legs.

“It was my fault,” Byleth said firmly, “but I appreciate you trying to cover for me. Lorenz, I hope you’re not hurt.”

“Not at all,” said Lorenz. “Thank you for a delightful dance, professor.” He inclined his head in a slight bow. When Sylvain struck up a new song, he proffered his hand to Hilda instead.

“Would you do me the honor of letting me have this one, Hilda?” he asked.

“Why — yes, Lorenz. Of course,” Hilda said, surprised. She’d expected Lorenz to ask Professor Byleth again — actually, he probably _should_ have. She couldn’t deny that she was kind of pleased to be asked, though, if only because Lorenz was apparently such a good dancer.

As they began to move to the slow, meandering tune Sylvain was plucking, Hilda’s chin on Lorenz’s shoulder and Lorenz’s hand protectively on her upper back, Hilda found her stomach soaring and swooping with a genuine, undiluted rush of happiness. Somewhere in the background, she thought she heard Professor Byleth ask Claude to dance and Claude accepting. Actually, maybe it was the other way around, but her mind had gone all fuzzy and white and it was difficult to tune anyone but Lorenz into focus.

They danced like that for the rest of the night.

* * *

Byleth wondered if Lorenz had been very upset — he hadn't seemed annoyed or embarrassed, and she knew he wore his heart on his sleeve more than some, but it was still hard to be sure. But he was off dancing with Hilda, his arms one hand on her waist and one on her upper back, and, even with his eyes closed, he looked unreservedly and uncomplicatedly happy.

She turned and smiled at Claude.

"They're cute," she said.

"Who?" When she gestured at Hilda and Lorenz, Claude said, "Oh, they're not a…"

He trailed off and looked at them with a different, evaluating eye, one Byleth recognized from her strategy classes, when he ran between the wooden figures set up on their simulated battlefields and the blackboard, drawing arrows that he through no amount of explaining managed to elucidate to his classmates, but which always ended in victory. She didn't see why he'd look like that right now, but he was probably as drunk as she was. She kept wanting to _giggle_ and that was hardly any more appropriate than a strategizing face.

"Yeah," he said. "They are cute, aren't they?"

"Yeah," Byleth echoed. "Very cute." But it seemed rude, somehow, to keep gazing at them while they looked so consumed with each other. It wasn't like they were there to entertain Byleth; a change of subject might be in order. She said, "Are you going back to your guard? I think I interrupted your dance."

But the guard had started dancing with someone else, though he gave Claude a curt, maybe slightly apologetic, nod. Claude shrugged.

"Guess not."

"Sorry about that."

"Ah, it's okay, Teach." Claude shot her his amazing smile; it was so wide and so good that he'd probably be able to turn defeat to victory just by smiling at the enemy after all was said and done. "He's a handsome guy, but maybe not totally my type."

"What is your type?" Byleth asked without thinking, then intently, desperately, furiously wished she hadn't. That was such a Manuela thing to say, how could she possibly have gone there?

Claude did not respond immediately, probably because it was a totally inappropriate question, but his eyes suddenly seemed darker, blacker, his pupils dilating as he studied her face, and something inside her chest — a thrill resonating through her, eliciting a cackle in the back of her mind and a hot blush on her cheeks — made it hard to look back. She rested her gaze on the deer on his shirt instead, tracing its fractal gilded horns.

"I'm not sure," he said, not in his normal, cheerful voice. He sounded a little confused, a little intense, a little… There was something she couldn't really place.

"I'm sorry," she said. Ever since Ignatz had danced into her, she reflected, she'd been doing a lot more apologizing than she usually did on a Saturday night.

"Nothing to be sorry about, Teach." Claude slotted right back into his usual self. "Although. I know it's your birthday, but if you think you're getting all my secrets out of me, you're pushing your luck."

"Aw, rats." Byleth was grateful for the out. She didn't even know why she'd asked. A blip of insanity, she decided, and determined to ignore Sothis’s insistent snickering. "Well, it was worth a shot."

"Yeah," Claude said, "trying's free." He grinned at her rakishly, every hint of confusion and intensity and whatever else so thoroughly disappeared from his demeanor that Byleth might just have imagined it, and said, "Anyway, I have a question for you, too."

"You're not getting any secrets, either," Byleth automatically replied. Claude laughed.

"Not that. Not this time. I was just wondering — seeing as my previous partner is off dancing with Mercedes and your previous partner is busy competing for the title of most nauseatingly cute couple with Hilda — if I could have a dance with the birthday girl."

“Of course,” Byleth said, adding, quite earnestly, “I’ve been wanting to dance with you all night.”

“Even though you’re so popular? I’m honored, Teach.” He also sounded quite earnest, at least earnest for Claude, and Byleth scoffed.

“I don’t think ‘honored’ is the word that should come to mind,” she said. “You’ve seen me dance.”

“And I look forward to experiencing it for myself.”

The music issuing forth from Sylvain’s guitar was still rather slow and soulful, a little yearning. Hilda and Lorenz weren’t the only ones dancing close, heads on shoulders and hands on backs: the mood was almost romantic. Byleth wasn’t used to romantic situations, in relation to dances or otherwise, but, she consoled herself, at least the dancing didn’t look to require complicated steps she didn’t know and had no chance of learning. She took a moment to watch Claude for signs that he wanted to wait for a different type of tune, but he just reached out tentatively and put his large hands on her waist, drawing her close.

It felt like being shocked, like when you were in the middle of a fight and a mage cast Bolganone on you and you could feel your every nerve ending twisting and fraying. Except… although it was equally terrifying, it was not unpleasurable. Far from it, dismayingly far from it, it actually felt good. Incredible. Absolutely terrifying. Byleth swallowed back some little noise, she didn’t know what, and, her head spinning so much she couldn’t seem to form a single coherent thought, wrapped her arms around Claude’s neck.

She put her chin on his shoulder and closed her eyes and decided to, for once, just let herself enjoy something. Maybe it was concerning that she couldn’t seem to think — but maybe she didn’t always need to think quite so much.

* * *

Much later at night, after the party had disintegrated into yawns and admissions of defeat where drinking was concerned and people dropped off back to their own beds, either alone or together, Teach came to Claude's room. With little fanfare, some might say none, she climbed into bed with him, covers falling down onto the floor as she slung one leg over his and straddled him.

"I…" he began to say, but didn't know how to complete the sentence. Anyway, Teach shushed him, and once she took his hands and placed them on her waist, there was no way he was going to be able to speak at all. The silky fabric of her nightgown — an incongruously sexy number, almost a negligée, it didn't seem like something Teach would either own or wear — felt like water beneath his skin and shimmered in the moonlight that had somehow found its way into his room.

"Touch me," she said in a low and husky tone, almost a whisper. Claude hadn't known Teach could sound like that. "You want to, don't you?"

"Yes," he admitted, but he didn't know what he dared to do, and so he just let his hands rest on the curve of her waist. His eyes found her legs, exposed up to the upper thigh where the slip of a nightgown had ridden up; her full breasts, only barely covered by the same skimpy nightgown; her parted lips and her heavy-lidded gaze; and he began to stir beneath her, even as he pleaded with his body not to react.

"C'mon, Claude. Please." It was almost a whimper. She took his hands again and skimmed them around to her front, pushing the top part of the nightgown down to give him full access to her tits. His breath, once he managed to inhale, was a ragged gasp. They were gorgeous, impeccable, better than anything he'd ever seen either in real life or in images, and he couldn't stop himself from grabbing them, stroking them almost reverently. When he slipped a rapidly stiffening nipple between two fingers and gently tweaked it, just to see it grow more swollen still, it was her turn to gasp; it, in turn, made him even harder. He reluctantly relinquished his grip to twist his fingers into Teach's hair instead and she sighed softly as he pulled her forward and down so he could rear up and crush his lips against hers.

"I didn't know how much I wanted this," he groaned, kissing her with a forcefulness he didn't recognize in himself; he felt as if possessed. It was sudden and jarring and he moved the one hand left on her breast back to her ass instead, using his palm to drag her closer into his body. Closer. He couldn't get her close enough. "Didn't know how much I wanted _you_ , Teach." His tongue was in her mouth and when he felt, rather than heard, her moan, his hips bucked up against her almost involuntarily.

"I want you, too," Teach said, breaking away enough to speak but leaning her forehead against his so that they were still touching. "That's why I came here. I want you so much I can't think. It's interfering with _everything_."

He couldn't stop himself from kissing her again at that; he sucked her lower lip into his mouth, biting it, one of her hands on his neck and the other dragging her fingernails down his chest. The scrape felt like she was painting him with fire — his mind dissolved into nothing. All he could see, all he could focus on, was her in front of him, her frantic lips on his, the flutter of her eyelashes each time her heavy lids shifted, his palm on her ass, his other hand threaded through her hair, cradling the nape of her neck. He bucked up against her again and she ground down right on top of him, right on top of his—

She broke away from the kiss again and said, "Maybe I should take care of that for you."

"This can't be real," he managed to choke out as she began to dive in beneath the covers — which were somehow back on top of them — and she paused and looked up.

"I guess you're right. It can't be," she said with a little regretful smile, and then Claude opened his eyes to find himself clutching his pillow, in bed alone, no moonlight, no Byleth. It took him a second to register the loss; as soon as he did, he wanted practically to howl with it. The most disturbing thing was perhaps that he _did_ register it as a loss — even though his conscious mind had no time for this kind of thing, his body, at least currently, wanted Teach so much it felt like it'd pretty much just take one touch to bring him over the brink. Was he still drunk? He must be. Claude didn't generally suffer from a lot of sexual frustration — he had more important things to bother with than whether he was getting laid or not — and for sure he wouldn't normally allow himself to think that way about Teach of all people, but just this once he decided to give himself a break. He took himself in hand and let his thoughts continue where the dream had ended.

He spent the Sunday in the woods, alone with his bow, and come class on Monday he could just about make himself look Teach in the eye again.


	4. Chapter 4

Byleth opened her eyes to look straight at Sothis, who laid curled up on her stone throne like a cat in a sunspot. She was playing with a glass sphere, like a marble but larger, rolling it back and forth between her palms. When she saw Byleth approach, she quit what she was doing, closing both hands around the sphere and hiding it from view.

“You’re late,” Sothis said, more teasingly than properly accusatory, though of course that girl was as changeable as the wind.

“No, I’m not,” said Byleth. How could she be? This was hardly an appointment she’d failed to keep.

“You are,” Sothis insisted. She was beginning to sound a little more cross, as was her wont. “Don’t you think I, of all people, know time? I!”

“Fine. Late for what?” The room they were in was empty as ever: blackness as deep as the inside of your eyelids; a stone dais; a stone throne perched on the stone dais; a girl perched on the throne. It would be nice to — just for once — get to have a dream that was not about some unknown war or about a girl reproaching her. Maybe that was why Byleth’s voice turned toward the sardonic as she continued, “It hardly looks like there’s some kind of gathering I’m missing. Or maybe they all grew tired of waiting for me and went home?”

“Do not act sarcastic! It does not become you,” Sothis said with a scowl. “You impertinent fool. Is there truly nothing behind those blank eyes of yours? You are not late for an event. You are late for a… realization.”

Byleth didn’t respond; she just looked at Sothis with her allegedly blank eyes. She knew better than to just guess wildly when Sothis wanted to tell her something — it was usually more expedient to wait for her to come out with it.

“Well?” Sothis said. She shifted in her seat, sitting up straight with the large marble in her lap, and looked down at Byleth imperiously. “What is it?”

“Sothis. Even without all this, I’m going to wake up hungover. Could you just tell me what you want?”

“Hungover. Hm! I see! And why is it that you are going to wake up hungover?”

“Because my students threw me a birthday party.” She thought for a second. “And it was your birthday, too. Happy birthday, Sothis.”

“You almost forgot, didn’t you? So very like you! I expected nothing else.” She still looked quite pleased that Byleth actually _had_ remembered, though, and had elected to mention it. “Was it all your students? Who threw you this party?”

“Yes, I—”

“Or was it one student in particular?” Sothis skimmed both palms over her marble and something surfaced from its murky depths, making it glow green. It was Ignatz’s painting, Byleth saw, though Ignatz himself had been cropped out of it, and those remaining in the picture were moving, the streaks of oil paint that made them up shifting and rearranging. The small painted Byleth there, deep inside the glass, tilted her head back and took a deep breath, smiled. The small painted Claude by her side reached out and took her hand. In the picture, they’d been walking, but when they joined hands, they both stopped and turned toward each other. Claude pulled Byleth closer, until she was right in front of him, reaching out a hand of her own and touching his neck. That was all she saw: with her next blink, the painting was pulled under once more by the swirling gray smoke inside the marble.

“Neat trick,” said Byleth. She felt somehow, and for reasons she could not readily intuit, defensive. It was not something she was accustomed to in herself and it made her words curt.

“Not enough? Truly, you are obstinate. Very well.”

Sothis shook the sphere and this time the smoke dissipated to show Byleth not a painted image, but a scene so realistically rendered that it could have been unspooled from her own memory, except that she was looking straight at her own self. She was sitting at her desk, toying with her pen, letting a fat red drop of ink roll out of it and splash onto the blotter. It didn’t take a change in vantage point to show Claude sitting on the opposite side of the desk for Byleth to remember that day — she’d thought about it plenty, entirely without Sothis’s assistance.

Her face looked so sad; every time she peeked up at Claude, she seemed struck anew by sadness. Actually, staring down into the marble, Byleth was struck by it again then and there, a jagged sharp stab that sort of felt like it punctured a lung. (Byleth had suffered her fair share of broken ribs.) She wished she could go back in time. Technically, she _could_ go back in time, she supposed, but not far enough to protect Claude from whatever and whoever had hurt him.

In the scene, Claude smiled, both of them still in profile. He said something to try to make her laugh, but she still had that punctured-lung look on her face, and then he pushed his chair back and stood, walking around to her side of the table. He mumbled something — Byleth could see his lips move, though the marble was apparently not equipped to transmit sound — and the viewpoint changed again as he gathered Byleth in his arms and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. He touched two fingers just beneath her chin and tilted her face up, leaned in—

Byleth looked away.

“It didn’t happen like that,” she said.

“Did I make any promises to you that I would only show you what took place? It can still be true. But if you insist on being literal…”

All of a sudden, there was sound; there was music. Two figures sat at the bottom of the sphere, a little like the carved figurines they used for their strategy boards, but so finely made and animated that they could have been the real Byleth and Claude, if not for the fact that they were tiny and lacquered. They shifted slowly to and fro atop a carpet of grass, Byleth’s arms looped around Claude’s neck and his arms cradling her waist. Okay, that had taken place, that was real. They hadn’t danced just that once; they’d danced for the rest of the night — Byleth remembered, with a keenness that surprised her, how happy she'd felt with her smile hidden in Claude’s shoulder and their bodies melding together. The stars dotting the night sky were faithfully copied by the sphere; so, too, were the fireflies that had appeared as if from nowhere, filling the world with pinpricks of light. Every last song they’d had together, until Sylvain had started complaining of tired fingers and gone off to the greenhouse with a stiff drink and a pretty girl.

In a break between songs, Byleth and Claude stopped moving — well, the figurines did — and Claude laughed a little awkwardly. He reached out a tentative hand and stroked the back of her head, running it over her hair. That had also happened, Byleth just about remembered when she saw it, though booze had hit them both pretty hard by that point and she'd never have recalled it of her own accord. Would Claude remember it? Probably not. He'd seemed just as far gone as her.

“You good, Teach?” Claude’s voice was garbled, like he was underwater, but behind that filter there was an alcohol-aided looseness and earnestness to his voice, so far off from his usual guarded, quippy self.

“I’m perfect,” Byleth sighed, her voice equally garbled.

“Yeah, you—” Claude interrupted himself with another laugh, short and sheepish. “Yeah, you really are.”

“No, _this_ is perfect,” she said. “You—”

But the music started back up again and Byleth couldn’t recall what she’d intended to say, if anything. It was a true image, she had to concede, though the next one summoned up, with a sharp snap of Sothis's fingers, was plainly not.

The figures remained, but the grassy lawn was switched out for a tiled floor, shiny stone, intricately patterned. Byleth’s dark hair was twisted into an updo and adorned with a shimmering veil. She and Claude were still dancing, gazing into each other’s eyes, but Byleth was clad in a silken ivory gown with a sweeping train. Claude looked older — the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled at Byleth — and resplendent in black and gold, dramatically handsome even in miniature. Though the figures were small, you could make out the bands glistening on their ring fingers.

“Very funny,” the non-marble Byleth said with a glare Sothis’s way.

“I am only showing you what’s true.”

“It is not true.”

“Inside your heart, or what passes for it. Your soul. Deep inside. He is a good-looking man, is he not? For a human. You could do worse for a groom.”

“I’m never going to get married,” Byleth said, starting to lose grip of her temper, “and Claude is my student.”

“He is not so much younger than you and you are hardly a real teacher.”

That galled. Sure, Byleth had been forced into her teaching position without much choice in the matter, and she knew her relationship with her students was very different than that of, say, Professor Hanneman or Professor Manuela with their own houses. Still, she taught, didn’t she? How was she not a teacher? She took her job seriously and she did not need that questioned.

“I know you think you can read my mind,” Byleth snapped, an ache beginning to lap at the back of her skull, “but you’re wrong. You’re acting stupid, Sothis. Really fucking stupid.”

“Oh, I’m stupid, am I?” Sothis stood up on her throne. She was always quick to take offense, but Byleth usually tried not to provoke her. Not this time. Even Byleth had her limits. Sothis just railed on: “I can’t read your mind? Then what’s this?”

She swept her arm out in a wide arc and with a loud bang a door in the back of the hall opened — a door which had surely never been there before. Claude and Byleth tumbled in together as one, so tangled up in each other were they; Claude threaded his fingers through Byleth’s hair and pulled her head back, laying her pale throat bare. He sunk his teeth into the side of it and she moaned.

The second Byleth — the real Byleth — just stared at the scene. She both wanted and did not want to look away. She couldn’t, at any rate: she seemed to be locked in the pair’s direction, barely able to blink.

She watched as her own lips parted with another moan.

“Fuck, Byleth,” Claude panted. The Byleth she was watching frantically tore his shirt open, the one with the golden deer embroidery, and pulled him closer, her hands all over him. He shrugged the shirt off and pushed her dress up around her waist, too impatient to undress her entirely before he put his mouth back on her, dragging her teeth up her neck, to her earlobe. His hand was still in her hair and he pressed his lips against her parted ones, drawing her toward him, tightening his fingers.

“You want this?” he asked, voice sweet but edged with roughness, and Byleth nodded desperately, fingers working the stays of his pants.

“Yes,” she keened, then paused, her chest heaving with each breath. “Do you?”

“More than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

His hands moved to Byleth’s breasts, dragging her dress down so quickly it broke at the straps; Byleth took him out of his undone pants, encircled his cock with a loose fist.

He inhaled in what was almost a hiss as Byleth begged, “Fuck me.”

Mercifully, the real Byleth heard a click behind her and the scene disappeared, just like that. Still, she turned to face Sothis — she would not be able to live with herself if she saw any more of that particular situation and she didn’t really trust Sothis not to turn it back on to spite her if she realized as much.

“Are you going to stand there with that look on your face and that blush on your cheeks and tell me this is not something you’ve longed for?” Sothis demanded.

“It’s not,” Byleth said miserably. At least consciously, it wasn’t. She didn’t want it to be.

“It is. I know you better than you know yourself. Remember the night of the ball? How elated you were to come upon him in the tower?”

Byleth tried to keep the thoughts from crowding her head, like wilful ignorance was just a function of persistence.

“It’s always been Claude, hasn’t it? Ever since I helped you save him. Young master Von Riegan.”

“No more,” Byleth whispered, her head so sore now that she had to clutch it in her hands. “Please just let me wake up.”

“Oh, very well. You’re no fun. You won’t remember this now. But one day…”

Byleth woke up with a violent jerk, like she’d been pushed off a cliff or down the stairs. She couldn’t recall what kind of peril she’d been dreaming about; all she knew was that she did not feel particularly well-rested. Her temples throbbed and a column of nausea rose steadily through her stomach, pitchy and bilious.

“Wake up, lazybones,” Sothis’s voice echoed in her mind. “The sun is already high in the sky! You sleep too heavily, you know.

* * *

Sometimes Claude successfully told himself to get a grip and sometimes he found himself in the trap of watching Teach like Lorenz watched her. Like he wanted her. Like he had a silly crush.

The birthday party had both made things worse and better. Worse because the way he’d reacted to her every touch had been unprecedented in a way that made him feel as though he was becoming unmoored from reality. Better because he could blame it on the alcohol. The dream after and the way he’d dealt with it — that was harder to contend with. Sure, he could blame that one on the alcohol as well, and he probably would if he let himself think about it. He greatly preferred not to, though, out of the nebulous but (he reluctantly admitted to himself) reasonably justified fear that it would happen again, and then again, that it would somehow begin to consume him. You could court dreams, or you could refuse to.

Claude refused to.

Byleth was his teacher and his friend, not someone — he cut Lorenz a sideways look — to moon over. Lorenz wasn’t looking particularly invested right now, he was busy whispering something to Hilda, but still. Teach was at the front of the classroom drawing stick figures and arrows on the blackboard, appending them with the names of students. At the top of the board, she’d scrawled, ‘Battle of the Eagle and Lion and Deer.’

“I’m sorry they’re not very good,” she said, examining her stick figures as her chalk squeaked down a final line. “Anyway, Marianne, you stay back here — oh, how are you coming along with the certification exam?”

As usual, you’d have to strain to hear Marianne’s reply to any given question — this time, Claude chose not to strain. It was the end of the Wyvern Moon and a chill had set in; all of a sudden, people were shivering, discussing uselessly and endlessly how the weather sure had turned, like it didn’t turn every Wyvern Moon. Cyril kept the fireplaces both fastidiously tidy and lit; the ones in the Golden Deer classroom painted a soft orange glow not only over the rough stone walls but over their professor.

(Over all of them, no doubt, but Claude’s eyes didn’t rest on anyone else anywhere near as often. Well, she was their lecturer, after all, and it would be rude not to pay attention.)

Teach’s hair looked so much darker, almost black, in the warm glow, and her face was luminescent beneath the slash of her bangs. She’d become so much more animated since the start of the semester, Claude reflected, his gaze sort of catching on her; he couldn't have moved it, he thought, if he'd tried. Intermittently, the flickering light of the fire illuminated a smile dimpling her cheeks or a smirk or the quirk of a brow, a purposely dramatic gesture or an eager nod. Whether she was moving around the classroom or standing in repose as she listened carefully to someone's question, it was just very hard not to look at Teach — of course, Claude told himself once more, you _should_ be looking at your professor during class. That was simply part of being a good student.

Still. Maybe not quite like this. There was a smudge of chalk dust on the tip of her nose and it made him feel like his heart was expanding in his chest until he couldn't breathe. He forced himself to look down into his notes instead. Clearly he must have taken them — he remembered jotting words down and the hand-writing was his — but they meant nothing to him in the moment. He could read them, of course, but his brain wouldn’t seem to process them. The words slid away from him, leaving no impression whatsoever. 

“Claude,” someone said in a tone that implied that it wasn’t the first time she’d said it. When he looked back up, Leonie’s hazel eyes bored into his. “Professor told us to pair up.”

Claude didn’t respond immediately, still lost somewhere in thought; Leonie crossed her arms and made an impatient noise.

“To discuss the Eagle and Lion strategy training? Were you listening at all?”

“No. I mean, yes. Okay, come on.” He grasped for something, anything that he could remember had been said about the playing field. “We should— we should try to secure the central hill, right?”

Claude felt rattled. He did not like feeling rattled.

He didn’t like it at all.


End file.
